How to Turn Learning Strategies into Habits

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learner independence, strategies

Habits everywhere:  Do you brush your teeth? Of course you do. Do you think about it though? I am sure the answer here is ‘No’. Brushing our teeth is something we do no matter what, something that does take a few minutes (esp if you do it regularly – or if you happen to have an unusually large number of teeth 🙂 ) but which is nevertheless completely effortless. It is a habit. Apparently, a great part of our everyday lives – more than 40% – consists of such routines. Would it not be great if we could help our students establish habits which would actually help them improve their English? Can you imagine how much progress our students would make if they did these things on a daily basis?

EL Learning Habits: This article is about how we can help create habits. Naturally, as teachers we would like our learners to form habits which help them improve their English. Not all strategies are equally good candidates however. In the text below I have included five simple things any learner can try to do habitually. For more ideas on Learning Strategies, click here.

How to form a habit: Charles Duhigg has studied habits extensively and his excellent book ‘The Power of Habit’ (Duhigg 2012) offers great insights into the nature of these routines and on how we can make use of them. Here are some of them:

The habit cycle: A habit consists of three parts: the cue, the routine and the reward. The cue is what ‘presses the button’ for us to perform a particular behaviour; the routine is the behaviour itself; the reward is what we get out of this. This is usually a feeling of satisfaction or pleasure or release or excitement – depending on the nature of the routine. For instance, after my morning coffee, I sit down in front of my computer and solve 3-4 chess puzzles. The cue is the coffee; the routine is the puzzles and the reward is the little shots of dopamine I get every time I successfully solve one. (To watch a 2-min clip on this, click here).

Why is the cue important? The cue is what triggers our behaviour. It can be an event (the alarm going off) or a place we find ourselves in (the staffroom) or an action that we perform (eating). Each of these can trigger a habit – e.g. going for a 10 minute jog (after the alarm), or making a coffee (upon entering the staffoom) or brushing our teeth (after eating). The cue is very important if we want to establish a constructive habit because ideally we want to engage in this behaviour without thinking (on the importance of action triggers see Heath & Heath 2011 – p. 209). The presence of the cue helps make things automatic.

Why is the reward important? Well, it is true of course that ‘virtue is its own reward’ – going for a run triggers the release of endorphins and brushing your teeth leaves your mouth feeling fresh. However, in the initial stages of habit formation we need to give ourselves an additional incentive – just as some parents do when teaching their kids dental hygiene. It is a good thing if that reward is something concrete. For instance, I always found it hard to transfer notes from the books I read to Excel sheets on my computer. Now I have decided to make at least 10 entries every morning. And then I reward myself with a quick game of online chess. It works like a charm.

Do we really need rewards? Some people feel that once they have performed the routine, they do not need the reward; this is a mistake. It is true the reward will not help them on that day, but it will link the routine with a pleasurable feeling; this will make it more likely they will stick to their habit on days when their motivation might flag. Others might feel that the risk here is that we might detract from the intrinsic pleasure of the routine if we come to expect a reward at the end. This is a valid concern generally, but it does not apply here; the reward is not for the action we perform – we reward ourselves for sticking to a habit we want to form! (For an amazing 3-minute story about the power of rewarding ourselves, click here).

What about the routine? This is a crucial point: in establishing a habit it is vital that we start small. As small as possible. Many people go wrong here; in their desire to see quick progress they set themselves impossible tasks. It is very hard to go from doing no exercise at all to jogging 20 min a day; it is much easier to tell yourself that you are going to go down the stairs rather than use the lift, or walk to the next bus stop rather than to the one closest to where you live. What matters initially is that we stick to the habit; once we have done so we can then go on to do more and more. (To watch a 70-second clip on this, click here).

How should I plan my habit? Research shows that you are much more likely to stick to your habit if you plan meticulously in advance. You need to be clear about details. For instance, let us say you decide to go jogging every morning. You need to decide in advance: i) What clothes are you going to wear? (T-shirt, short, sneakers)  ii) Where are you going to jog? (round the block)  iii ) How long are you going to jog for? (5 min). These ‘implementation intentions’ are crucial (see also Halpern 2016 – p. 144);  i) they send a message to yourself that you mean business and  ii) they make it far easier to execute your plan when the time comes. (To watch a 40-second clip on this, click here).

Does it matter if I miss a day?: In establishing a habit, consistency is key. Missing your routine for a day does not matter so much; missing two days in a row however can be serious. Missing it for three days can be disastrous. Research shows that the chances of sticking to your habit go down by 5% in the first case, but then the figure jumps to 55% in the case of two days and more than 90% if you fail to follow your programme three days running. (To watch a 30-second clip on this, click here).

How can I reduce the risk of giving up? An excellent way of making sure we stick to our habit is to make contingency plans. What happens if for whatever reason I cannot go jogging for 5 minutes because it is pouring with rain outside? No problems: we can have a Plan B that we can fall back on. In this case, we could say that instead of jogging, we could use the skipping-rope for 3 minutes, or, if we cannot do that, perhaps do 3 sets of sit-ups and 3 sets of push-ups. It does not matter if the amount of exercise we get is the same; what matters is that we are sending a signal to ourselves that we are serious about our commitment. (To watch a 70-second clip on this, click here).

How long does it take to consolidate a habit? According to some research, it takes about 66 days. This may sound a lot, but remember that this initial small investment of consistent effort (as the routine is small initially) should pay huge dividends over the following months and even years. With habits one should think long-term. Once we are pretty confident that the habit has been established, we can then increase the routine – e.g. from 5 minutes of jogging to 10 minutes plus some push-ups. The possibilities are endless. (To watch an 1-min clip on this, click here).

[OK – now you have read all this, you may want to watch this short video (from which most of the others were taken). It offers a nice summary of all the above].

Last Words – Why habits? There are two reasons why I believe the creation of learning habits is very promising:  i) once a habit is formed, it requires almost no will-power to keep it up. You simply do things on auto-pilot. This means that for a relatively small initial investment of effort, the yields over large periods of time can be huge;  ii) the habit changes your self-perception. You start thinking of yourself differently – you give yourself a new identity (‘I am an exerciser’ / ‘I am a serious learner of English’ / ‘I am a dieter’). The big idea is that this changed self-image can then trigger additional changes leading to a virtuous circle. Here is a 60-second clip in which Brian Wansik with a fantastic example. Enjoy.  🙂

* To go to a site with logic and lateral thinking puzzles, click here.

** To see an example of such a song click here.

 

 

References

Duhigg, C. (2012) The Power of Habit. London: Random House Books

Halpern, D. (2016) Inside the Nudge Unit. London: WH Allen

Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2011) Switch. London: Random House

YouTube – ‘The Power of Habit’ [Animation]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxy8dDSHHaw

YouTube – ‘How to Build Habits and Execute Effortlessly’ [Animation]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LdhudFvJuE&t=69s

YouTube – Dan Ariely ‘The Secret to Kicking Procrastination: Reward Yourself’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbEa1P4sqd8

YouTube – Brian Wansink ‘From Mindless Eating to Mindlessly Eating Well’ TEDx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ogsmh_czeY&t=4s

10 Additional Tips on Classroom Management and Motivation [3]

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Classroom Management, Motivation

An annotated lesson: This made-up story is again meant to be an exercise. The idea is that you read through it and try to see whether you agree with the teacher’s decisions / practices. There are at least 10 interesting points in this short narrative. Can you spot them? If you agree with what John did, can you say why? If you think he has made a mistake, why do you think so? What should he have done instead? [NB: This is not meant to be a model lesson nor is John a model teacher; rather it is a collection of interesting moments from a lesson which help illustrate some good and some not so good practices relating to Classroom Management and Student Motivation].

[This is the third post on the topic; to see the first one, click here. To read the second one, click here].

John’s story: John walked leisurely towards his classroom. He was early. He glanced into the staffroom and there was Agnes, the DOS. ‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked her. ‘You don’t look your usual happy self…’ ‘It’s Mark’ Agnes replied. ‘He just called in sick and had 3 hours to teach later today….’ ‘Hang on; I know his schedule – that’s 17:00 to 20:00, right? I could stand in for him’ said John. ‘Oh, John’ said Agnes ‘You are an angel!’. ‘That’s what colleagues are for’ replied John smiling.

‘Hi everyone’ John boomed as he walked in. Everyone smiled and said ‘Hi’ – they liked John. ‘Wow Mary!’ John exclaimed ‘Nice tan!’ Mary smiled coyly. ‘And Paul – you’ve been working out, haven’t you? Well done! You look fit and you’ve lost weight too!’ Paul flexed his muscles striking a body-builder pose. Everyone laughed.

‘Excuse me sir’ said Catherine. ‘There was something I wanted to ask you about. Now that I’ve got my B2 certificate, do you think I should take the C1 exam as well, or should I skip it and go straight for the C2 test?’ ‘Well’ John said ‘There is no point in taking the C1, is there? Since you are going to take the C2 exam, why bother?’ ‘OK – thank you sir’ Catherine replied.

‘OK everyone!’ said John. ‘If you remember, for today you had to prepare to give a 60-sec mini presentation each. You have to describe to the class one learning strategy you use to improve your English and try to persuade us that it is effective. At the end, we will all vote secretly on which two were the most effective. As I have promised, the winner will get this amazing reader (John held up a book) OK – who would like to go first?’ [ …. ]

‘Right’ said John after everyone had finished. ‘Some great ideas there – well done. Now as homework, I would like you to do two things: I would like you to read an article of mine on ‘5 Effective ELT Strategies’. That’s based on a presentation I gave some time ago. I want you to read it and I want each of you to write a comment  about which of these strategies you think might work best for you’. John looked at Helen and Rose and winked at them; they winked back. John had given them two model answers and they had already posted them there.

‘But you know’ John continued ‘learning English is not just about conscious study. Your English improves every day – without you realising it. Think about the clips you watch on YouTube or the songs you listen to. Now, with the person next to you, I want you to make a list of 5 such ways in which your English gets better daily’. [ …. ]

‘OK – lots of good points here…. Now – another thing I wanted us to do today, was to have a debate. You know how the government are thinking about lowering the voting age to 17? Well, here is the idea – why not make it 15? In pairs, I would like you to debate this. But first – make notes of the arguments you are going to use. OK – you have 3 min to prepare’. [ …. ]

‘Good. I feel this has been a very productive lesson. Well done everyone. Now if you remember, last time we said that it is a good idea if we think back to the lesson later and try to recall what we did and evaluate what went well and what didn’t and whether there is one or more mental notes we need to make. So what I would like you to do when you get home is to make an entry into your journal. A short paragraph of 8-10 lines should be ok’.

The bell rang. ‘OK – class dismissed’ John said ‘but not before you have tidied up first!’ ‘Aren’t you forgetting something, sir?’ Catherine asked. ‘You said earlier that if we did well, you were going to teach us some essential ‘Survival English’ phrases in case we ever found ourselves in the US’.  ‘Ah, yes’ John said. ‘Watch this….’ *

Comments: There are a number of interesting points in this story. Some are obvious, some are less so and some are counterintuitive. All of them are research-based:

‘…I could stand in for him….’…: A very good idea. When we do things for others, they are bound to reciprocate in the future and this mutual assistance helps build stronger relationships between people. It is actually better if we do not wait to be asked and we offer to help of our own accord. And it goes without saying that help should be offered unconditionally. People will reciprocate in their own time (Cialdini 2001 – ch. 2).

‘…Wow Mary! – Nice tan!….’…: A mountain of research has shown that we like people who pay us compliments – even if we do not actually believe these to be true. Genuine compliments is one of the best and fastest ways to get closer to someone and make them feel good (Yeung 2011 – pp. 177-179). A good compliment means that at the very least you care enough about someone to have noticed something about them.

‘…There is no point … is there? ….’…: A mistake in my opinion. I am not saying that students should necessarily sit every exam there is, but it is important that they have a sense of progress; this acts as a reward. These rewards have to be frequent and piecemeal rather than rare and large As teachers, we need to make sure they can see they are getting closer to their objective. It is crucial for motivation (Levine 2006 – pp. 116-118).

‘…You have to describe one learning strategy ….’…: Excellent! Research has shown that there is a big difference between studying something for yourself and studying something so you can explain it to others; in the latter case, we activate different parts of our brain and as a result knowledge sinks in deeper! (Lieberman 2013 – p. 289) Do not take my word for it; just watch this fantastic short clip with Professor M. Lieberman (click here).

‘…the winner will get this amazing reader….’…: A big mistake. Numerous studies have shown that contingent rewards (‘Do this and you’ll get that’) are actually demotivating in the long run. Essentially, students start thinking (subconsciously) ‘If I have to be bribed to do this, then it is clearly not such an enjoyable activity’ (Pink 2010 – p. 8). On the other hand there is nothing wrong with offering a ‘surprise reward’ (‘Wow! This is an excellent story! Here is a sticker’).

 ‘…I would like you to read an article of mine….’…: This may look like showing off, but anything that sends students the message ‘Your teacher knows what s/he is doing’ can help enormously in increasing compliance and minimising discipline problems (Cialdini 2001 – ch. 6). Clearly, if students can see that the teacher writes articles for other colleagues or is a regular presenter in conferences they will trust him/her more. Hiding your credentials out of a sense of modesty is counterproductive.

‘…John had given them two model answers….’…: This is brilliant! There are many times when people want to do things, but they just do not want to be the first (e.g. asking Qs at a Conference, volunteering for an activity, or contributing ideas in an online forum). In such cases you need 1-2 people to act as catalysts by demonstrating the desired behaviour (you may need to recruit them in advance). The results can be amazing! (Ross & Nisbett 2011 – p. 223). Watch this clip. Then watch it again (from Ferrrier 2014 – p. 143).

‘…Think about the clips you watch on YouTube….’…: Another excellent idea! Apparently, simply making people aware of what they normally do can help them change the way they see themselves and hence their behaviour (Heath & Heath 2011 – p. 125). The idea is that telling people about the massive exposure they get to English these days, may well encourage them to seek this exposure and do this more deliberately and hence more effectively.

‘…I would like you to debate this….’…: A very interesting moment. Some colleagues are averse to debates preferring instead consensus-building activities. Research however shows that debates can be extremely effective at stimulating interest (Heath & Heath 2008 – p. 85). The reason seems to be arousal; heightened arousal feels good (which is why we go on rollercoaster rides). This excitement generated by debates, games etc. can spill over to the lesson and increase motivation (see Lewis 2013 – p. 27).

 ‘…a short paragraph should be ok….’…: A slip. While the idea of getting students to reflect is great, this is apparently the first or second time they will be doing this. A paragraph may be too much. When you want to change people, it makes sense to start small (Wiseman 2012 – pp 187-189). Once they get into the habit of doing something, they start seeing themselves in a different light (‘Oh! I’m a reflective learner!’). Then they can go on to write more.

The takeaways – 10 Tips:

Here are the 10 takeaways. Once again though – before reading them, see whether you can recall some of them. What are the principles? How would you have phrased them as tips for a colleague?

Reciprocity: Do little things for other people. What you do has to be unconditional and it is best if you offer to help yourself. Reciprocity strengthens our bonds with others.

Compliments: Pay people genuine compliments. Compliments oil the wheels of social interaction and lead to closer relationships.

The gain factor: Make sure that students can see the progress they are making. People need ‘milestones’. Regularly. Forget milestones – make that ‘inch-pebbles’ (Heath & Heath 2011 – p. 136).

Peer teaching: Get students to teach each other things;  i) they learn even more themselves and  ii) they come to see themselves in a different light.

Rewards: Avoid using contingent rewards as an incentive. They often undermine intrinsic motivation. (That said, it is ok to give the occasional ‘surprise’ prize).

Authority: Make sure your students know how good you are (qualifications, testimonials of expertise etc.). They are more likely to be disciplined and they will learn more.

Modelling: Sometimes you need someone to model the desired behaviour to ‘get the ball rolling’. Get students, colleagues or friends to provide this model.

The placebo effect: Make students aware of how much exposure they get to English through their daily activities; this can make them think of themselves as ‘active learner’.

Arousal: Use high-arousal activities (e.g. debates, competitions etc.) in class. They both motivate students and their excitement often spills over to the content.

Starting small: To get people to do something new, start small. Once they have taken the first small step, this will change the way they perceive themselves and they will do more.

Last words: I know I have said that before, but I will say it again: it is incredible how much better language teachers we can become by learning from looking for ideas beyond ELT. Many colleagues think that to improve as EL teachers, they need to learn more about the language, or linguistics, or methodology; I think this is only true up to a point. Once we can do our job competently enough, we need to look elsewhere. To paraphrase Howard Schultz (founder and CEO of Starbucks) “We are not in the Language business teaching people; we are in the People business teaching language” – that is quite a shift in focus.

[ * I know you are dying to watch that clip on ‘Survival English’. Here it is… 🙂 ]

References

Brown, P., Roediger, H., McDaniel, M. (2014) Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge Massachusetts. Belknap Harvard.

Cialdini, R. (2001) Influence – Science and Practice. Massachusetts, Allyn & Bacon.

Ferrier, A. (2014) The Advertising Effect. South Melbourne, Oxford University Press.

Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2008) Made to Stick. London: Random House.

Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2011) Switch. London: Random House.

Levine, R. (2006) The Power of Persuasion. Oxford: Oneworld.

Lewis, D. (2013) The Brain Sell. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Lieberman, M. (2013) Social. Oxford, Oxford University Press

Martin, S., Goldstein, N., & Cialdini, R. (2014) The Small Big. London: Profile Books.

Pink, D. (2010) Drive. Edinburgh, Canongate Books.

Ross, L. & Nisbett, R. (2011) The Person and the Situation. London: Pinter & Martin.

Wiseman, R. (2012). Rip it up. London: Macmillan.

Yeung, R. (2011) i is for Influence. London: Macmillan.

 

How to Use Comedies in Class

What is missing from ELT coursebooks? Open any coursebook you like. Chances are you will find a Unit on sports, the environment, food, celebrities – the one Unit you will not find is one on Humour (well, in 95% of coursebooks anyway…). But watch the clip below. Is it not far superior to any ordinary ELT audio track? It is funny isn’t it, that in a field dominated by British publishing houses, you may find numerous texts on British food (!) and not a single one on the one thing British people should really be proud of: British comedy. (‘Yes, yes’ I can hear you say ‘Never mind how good this stuff is – What matters to me as a busy teacher is this: can I use it?’ Well, now you can – and very easily too. See the note at the end. *)

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What can I use this material for? Well, the fact that most of the sketches are quite short suggests that they can be used as ‘fillers’ – a fun break during the lesson and a way of recharging the students’ ‘motivational batteries’. Alternatively you may choose to structure a whole lesson around some of them.  For the most part however, I see them as one of the ingredients of a good lesson. For instance, you may choose to use such clips to…

… introduce some topic (‘Comedy for ELT – Mistakes’ [click here] )

… practise topic vocabulary (‘Comedy for ELT – Technology’ [click here])

… demonstrate activities (‘Comedy for ELT – The ‘Yes-No’ Game’ [click here]) or

… practise situational / functional language (‘Comedy for ELT – Small Talk’ [see the clip below])

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How can I use comedy clips? Although this material is somewhat different than the ordinary audio tracks we use in class, there is no reason why our methodology should differ. As a rough guide, we can follow these steps:

Step 1: Set the context: This is particularly important if we want to help the students understand what is going on. We want to say a few things about the setting (time and place), we may need to explain the relationship between the speakers, explain 1-2 culturally-specific details if necessary and maybe give students an idea of what is funny about the sketch, without giving away the ‘punch-line’ which would detract from the students’ satisfaction (see this clip for instance).

Step 2: Pre-teach key vocabulary: Sometimes much of the fun of the dialogues lie in puns and double-entendres; we need to make sure that students can actually ‘get’ most of the jokes. At the same time we need to strike the right balance; if the teacher is to spend 15 min in preparing students for a clip which lasts 90 seconds, then this is clearly not cost-effective.

Step 3: Give students a global task: the normal sequence in listening tasks is first of all to get students to listen for gist. In the case of these sketches the first task is normally easier than one would expect as focusing too much on it would detract from the students’ enjoyment.  Typical activities are T/F Qs, Complete the sentence, Ordering, or Straightforward open-ended Qs.

Step 4: Get students to focus on bottom-up skills: Global listening is usually followed by listening for detail. In my experience students want to be able to understand the dialogues as fully as possible, which is why it makes sense to get them working with the script (e.g. typically filling-in gaps combined with adding, deleting or changing words). **

[A note on repetition: For the students to both enjoy the extracts and derive the maximum benefit from them, I believe it is a good idea to listen to them more than once.  In fact (unlike other material) the less challenging their task becomes through repeated listening, the more students enjoy the dialogues as they can appreciate the humour more – their increased confidence enables them to catch things they had previously missed!]

Step 5: Get students to focus on language: The language in such sketches is often extremely rich (sometimes deliberately, in order to produce a funny effect). As with most texts, I have found that it is best to get students to highlight useful language; that means  i) phrases or collocations – not words in isolation;  ii) phrases they can understand but which they would not use.

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How can I follow this up? As the main aim of the listening activities is to help students to appreciate and enjoy the dialogues, you may not want to include any follow-up language or skills work so as not to spoil the whole experience for them.  However, there are a number of things teachers can do after these listening sessions.  Here are some ideas:

Role play:  students may like a particular extract so much, they may want to act it out, or, better still, record their dialogue on audio or even video tape (‘Constable Savage’ [click here]).

Parallel writing:  students may write a similar dialogue on the same or a related theme (see the handout of the clip below).

Extension:  where a dialogue is part of a story, students may want to continue it, or simply write a paragraph ‘predicting’ what is going to happen next (‘Letters H – Miss P.’ [click here]) They can then listen to the rest of the sketch/episode to check their predictions.

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What are the key ‘DOs’ and ‘DON’Ts’?

DO: …set the context; help the students understand what is going on before they start listening.
DO: …support students with unknown vocabulary / background knowledge / cultural elements etc. (see this clip ***)

DO: …‘sell’ the idea to the students; otherwise some of them might think it is just a waste of time.
DO: …link the sketches to the rest of the lesson, so that there is a sense of purpose and continuity.
DON’T: …give students the punch-line; it spoils the sketch for them as it deprives them of the pleasure of understanding it themselves.
DON’T: …play extracts which require too much explanation.
DON’T: …take unnecessary risks with ‘dangerous / taboo’ topics (e.g. sex, politics, religion) – unless you know your class really well.
DON’T: …treat comedy clips like ordinary listening material; students should see it as a ‘treat’!

Last words: This is the main idea: You ‘sacrifice’ some of your precious contact time in the hope that the motivational effect will more than make up for it. In a sense, it is a calculated ‘gamble’; If it works, you may find that the students who spent 3 minutes in class watching a Rowan Atkinson video (like the one below), will then go on to spend another 5 hours at home watching every similar clip they can find!  🙂

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* So how can you use it? You go on YouTube. You type ‘Comedy for ELT’. Under most of the clips, you will see a link (see the picture). You simply click on the link and you can download a handout (+ the Key, + the script). The handout typically contains a short paragraph which sets the context, a first, global task (focusing on general comprehension) and a second task which draws the students’ attention on language. Sometimes ideas are given for follow-up activities.

** NB: The words which are blanked out are not random; in most cases words are deleted so that students have to understand the missing words to ‘get the joke’ or in order to focus their attention on some important preposition, collocation etc. Similarly, when a word is substituted for another, in the vast majority it is a near synonym, so that students will not have to look up the meaning of the original word.

*** In order to fully appreciate the humour in this particular clip, students need to be familiar with Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ AND with the fact that builders / electricians / plumbers etc. etc. have a reputation for being unreliable (see how this is done in the handout [click here]).

10 More Tips on Classroom Management and Motivation [2]

Tags

Classroom Management, Motivation

Another annotated lesson: This made-up story is again meant to be an exercise (to see the previous one, just click here). The idea is that you read through it and try to see whether you agree with the teacher’s decisions / practices. There are at least 10 interesting points in this short narrative. Can you spot them? If you agree with what Alex did, can you say why? If you think he has made a mistake, why do you think so? What should he have done instead? [NB: This is not meant to be a model lesson nor is Alex a model teacher; rather it is a collection of interesting moments from a lesson which help illustrate some good and some not so good practices relating to Classroom Management and Student Motivation].

Alex’s story: Alex felt really happy working in this school. Everything was neat and tidy, the boards were always clean, the equipment was always in working order and there were all kinds of posters on the wall – some with interesting or funny quotes, others containing useful language. When Alex walked into the classroom the class were busy chatting to each other as usual. He looked around and coughed so the students would notice he was there.

‘Thank you, sir!’ piped up little Andrew as Alex walked into the classroom. Alex smiled and winked at him. Last time he had surreptitiously slipped a little ‘Happy Birthday’ card between the pages of Andrew’s book. ‘Hey! Did you get your IELTS results, Mark?’ Alex asked. ‘Yes, sir’ said Mark ‘Amazingly I got a 7.5! I never expected such a high mark!’. ‘Well, of course you did well’ said Alex ‘Don’t forget, we had prepared thoroughly – esp for Task 1 which was your weak point. Well done’.

Alex turned to Peter ‘Hey Peter! Don’t forget you’ve promised to show me how to use Moviemaker after the lesson’ he said. ‘I mean – what’s the point of having teenage students if they don’t teach you all this new-fangled technology stuff?’  Peter smiled. ‘Right-o sir!’ he said. ‘Are we going to do another crossword like we did yesterday?’ he asked. ‘Of course we are’ said Alex. ‘I know you love them…’

‘OK – before that however, we are going to read a text about some amazing animals. This lesson has been voted by former students as the second most interesting ever! OK – listen to these statements and with the person next to you try to complete them in a plausible way’ Alex read aloud: ‘1. There is a snake that can ………; 2. There is a plant that can eat ………; 3. There is a lizard that defends itself by ….……’.  *

The class discussed the statements in pairs and wrote down what they thought was the right answer. Then Alex gave them the text so they could check their predictions. ‘Amazing, or what?’ asked Alex. ‘OK – as homework, I would like you to search the net and next time you come I want each of you to give a mini presentation on a really special animal’.

‘OK – can someone give us a demo? Just a mini-monologue on one of the animals you’ve just read about. About 30-40 seconds. Paul – what about you? I know you like presentations’. ‘I don’t know’ said Paul sounding uncertain ‘I haven’t practiced it…’ ‘Oh, come on’ said Alex ‘It’s not a test; ok – just stand here at the front. I’ll help you if there are any words you don’t know…’

‘All right’ said Alex, when Paul had finished. ‘Thank you Paul. It wasn’t bad considering it was the first time…. OK everyone. Remember: next time you can talk about whichever animal you want to, but I want you to practice. In fact, I would like you to record yourselves before the next lesson. You can use Vocaroo – just Google it – it’s dead easy to use; you click on the red button and record your voice. Then you can send me the link of the recording by e-mail’.

The bell rang. ‘OK – class dismissed. Before you go however, I want all pieces of paper in the waste-paper basket and the desks all lined up exactly as you found them when you came in’ said Alex. The class started tidying up ‘Sir, sir – you promised you would tell us a joke!’ said Mark. ‘Did I? Oh, all right then….’ said Alex. ‘Have I told you the one with the castaway? Well, there was this guy and he was on a flight to New York. And when they started showing the film on the plane, he had seen it on TV and he was so disgusted, he got up and walked out. Now – as soon as he lands in the water….’

[* Answers: 1. There is a snake that can fly; 2. There is a plant that can eat mice; 3. There is a lizard that defends itself by squirting blood! ]

Comments: There are a number of interesting points in this story. Some are obvious, some are less so and some are counterintuitive. All of them are research-based:

‘…Everything was neat and tidy,….’…: The physical environment we operate in has a huge impact on the way we behave. Countless studies have shown that people tend to be well-behaved in an orderly environment, cheat more in dim places and be less productive in an untidy room. By changing the physical environment we can send the right (implicit) messages to our students: ‘This is a place of work’ (Martin, Goldstein & Cialdini 2014 – p. 28).

‘…a little ‘Happy Birthday’ card….’…: Very good. Little touches like that signal to students that the teacher sees them as individuals – not just as learners or members of a group and students appreciate that (see also Watkinson 2013 – p. 160). You might say ‘OK – isn’t this a cheap trick just to increase our popularity?’ Actually no, because it also impacts on students’ performance, but there is another reason too – acting like this changes you in the long run (see the last point).

‘…we had prepared thoroughly….’…: A slip. Our brain has the tendency to mull over things it cannot explain. Once it finds a reasonable / plausible explanation, it just files away the experience. This is good – if the experience is bad. It helps us achieve ‘closure’ and move on. But when the experience is a happy one, why stop thinking about it? ‘Explaining’ can mean ‘explaining away’. It is good for bad things – and vice versa (Wilson 2011 – p. 60).

‘…Don’t forget you’ve promised….’…: This is called ‘the Franklin Principle’. We assume that the more we do for others, the more they will like us; this is not wrong, but there is a much better way – getting them to do things for us! It’s pure Cognitive Dissonance: ‘Either i) this is a great guy and I’m doing the right thing helping him or ii) I am stupid’. What do you think our brain would rather believe?:-) (click here for a short video on this – see also Lieberman 2013 – p. 266).

‘…This lesson has been voted….’…: Excellent! It is very important to ‘sell’ what we are going to do to our students. How can we do that? Well, we can explain the rationale behind a task etc., but research has shown there is another, more persuasive way: telling students that other students like it. The ‘others like it, ergo it is good’ is one of the most powerful heuristic our lazy brain uses. Why not exploit it? (Berger 2016 – chapter 1).

‘…The class discussed the statements….’…: Very good! All too often, when we have something interesting to share with our class we just go right ahead. But wait! Why not tease them a little first? Studies have shown that interest and motivation soar when we make students curious about what is coming next. Getting them to predict content can be as effective as it is simple. And this also works with mundane material! (Heath & Heath 2008 – p. 80) Watch this clip.

‘…Amazing, or what?….’…: Brilliant! Methodology aside, content does matter – a lot! According to Berger (2013 – ch.. 1) when we come across something interesting – funny – weird etc., we tend to share it as it translates into ‘social currency’ (it makes us look good). Students will go home and chances are they will share this with their friends – and they will look up information on other bizarre animals on the web, which means additional exposure to the L2!.

‘…Paul – what about you? ….’…: This is a mistake though. Studies have shown that being watched by others can stimulate us to great efforts and we can perform very well provided that the task is easy or we have rehearsed it really well. Conversely, if the task is hard or we have not practiced it, feeling others watching us can cause us to fumble and perform poorly, which may in turn undermine our confidence (Ariely 2010 – p. 44).

‘…it’s dead easy to use’…: Another mistake – and a common one too. Just because we know how to do something does not mean others do too. Such misjudgments happen all the time – esp when we are giving instructions or explaining something (Heath & Heath 2008 – p. 80). It is very hard to put ourselves into the learners’

shoes, but we should try. We need to explain demonstrate and then check understanding. Watch this amazing clip (click here).

‘…Before you go however,….’…: Excellent. This is a little thing, which can easily become a routine. But in helping keep the class tidy, the students are also sending a message – to themselves. It is Cognitive Dissonance again: ‘Why am I doing this? Nobody is forcing me. If I am doing this, it must be because the class / the course / learning English is important’. The way we act, gradually changes the way we think about things (see Cialdini 2201 – pp. 63-71).

The takeaways – 10 Tips:

Here are the 10 takeaways. Once again though – before reading them, see whether you can recall some of them. What are the principles? How would you have phrased them as tips for a colleague?

Surroundings matter: Make sure the learning environment sends the right message to the students (‘We take learning seriously and we expect you to learn’).

‘You are special!’: Try to make your students feel special; little things such as remembering special days or their interests can go a long way.

Explaining away: If a student has had a setback, find a plausible innocuous explanation so that they stop thinking about it. But if it is something positive, do not explain it away.

The Franklin principle: Get students to do things for you (and help you with class work etc). Cognitive dissonance means they will like you more.

Social proof: Telling students that their peers like something / do something regularly is far more effective than trying to persuade your class to do it. Use Social Proof!

Tease – then tell: Instead of directly giving students information, engage their curiosity by means of Qs / incomplete sentences / guessing games. Motivation will soar.

Social currency: Use interesting materials – things that your students will want to share with others (e.g. urprising facts, witty quotes, jokes, interesting clips etc.).

The spotlight effect: Performing in public can energise people, and boost their confidence and motivation – but for this to happen they need to be well prepared for the task.

The curse of knowledge: Do not assume that people have understood what you said or what they have to do. Check understanding and instructions.

Actions into beliefs: Get students to do ‘the right thing’; we assume that beliefs lead to actions but very often it is the other way round.

Last words: Alex is of course a fictional person, but if he existed I would advise him to go home and write a few things about the lesson in his diary. What went well? What difficulties were there? What could have been done better? What opportunities were missed? Of course, when something is fresh in our minds, we think we will easily remember it, but of course this is not the case. The faintest pencil can beat the best memory any day. Even Alex forgot he had promised his class a joke. But I didn’t; it was on my notes. Here it is. Enjoy! 🙂 ).

 

References

Ariely, D. ( 2010) The Upside of Irrationality. London HarperCollins

Berger, J. (2013) Contagious. London: Simon & Schuster

Berger, J. (2016) Invisible Influence. London: Simon & Schuster

Cialdini, R. (2001) Influence – Science and Practice. Massachusetts, Allyn & Bacon

Epley, N. (2014) Mindwise. London: Allen Lane

Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2008) Made to Stick. London: Random House

Lieberman, M. (2013) Social. Oxford, Oxford University Press

Martin, S., Goldstein, N., & Cialdini, R. (2014) The Small Big. London: Profile Books

Watkinson, M. (2013) The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences. London: Financial Times Publishing

Wilson, T. (2011) Redirect. London: Penguin Books

 

‘How to Study: 6 Key Principles’

Research Findings on Studying Effectively

Six Key Principles: As teachers, our job is to help students study English more effectively. And generally, we are good at it. We know which language forms they should study first, which vocabulary items they should focus on, etc. But what about studying in general? Do we know how we learn? How we retain information? How we remember, how we forget and how we should study in order to maximize the former and minimize the latter?

What follows is a story. Peter is an imaginary student who has some things to study and goes about it systematically. What do you think about his choices? Would you have studied this material in the same way? There are at least 6 interesting points in the narrative. See whether you can spot them. It helps if you make brief notes on a piece of paper. Then you can read the comments under the story.

[NB 1 – Two Key Books: The 6 Principles described here are all based on research I read about in two fantastic books: ‘Make it Stick’ (by Brown, Roediger & McDaniel) and ‘Why don’t Students Like School’ (by D. Willingham). These are the best two books I have read in the last decade. I believe they are a must for every educator].

[NB 2 – In class: If you would like to use this text as an activity in class, to help raise your students’ awareness of these principles, click here to download a Word document. The task is the same.]

Peter’s Story: Peter sat down to plan his studying schedule for the day. There were two main things: Grammar and Vocabulary. He thought he would spend 2 hours on each of these. He would start with vocabulary; he would study from 10:00 to 12:00, then take a 30-min break and then he would study Grammar from 12:30 to 14:30. He always liked to finish with something before starting something else.

The vocabulary he had to study was adjectives related to personality. Peter’s teacher always told him and his classmates that words are best learned in context. He had given them a cloze passage (a text with gaps) along with the Key (click here to see the passage). In this way they could see how the words were actually used. Before looking at the Key (the full passage) Peter thought he would give the gapped text a try – just for fun. He knew the words were difficult, but still he thought it would be fun.

The text was very interesting. As he had predicted the vocabulary was quite demanding. He used the Key and copied out the missing words onto a separate sheet of paper. Next to each of them he wrote a brief explanation and an approximate translation in the L1. He also went back to the text and highlighted a number of unknown words which had not been deleted in the cloze passage. He looked them up in the dictionary. He did not have to study these, but he felt they would be useful nevertheless.

After he had been studying for an hour or so, he felt tired. He thought he would change his plan a little. He would rest for 15 min, then he would go off to do some shopping for his mother and afterwards he would come back and study vocabulary for another hour. Then he could have lunch, rest a little and perhaps play a little on the computer. Later he could study Grammar for an hour, then go to the gym, come back and finish his studying for the day.

When he started studying again, he thought he would do some revision. He went back to his notes and read the words and the short explanations / translations carefully. Then he went back to the passage. He read through the text and whenever he got to a gap, he looked through his notes to see which word would fit best. He was pleased to discover he did quite well. There were only a few words he did not get right.

Then he thought he would take things a little further. He wanted to see whether he could use some of the new vocabulary; the fact that the lexical items all had to do with the same topic did help a lot. He imagined he was talking to a friend, trying to describe to her what the character in the passage was like. He did not look at the passage, but he tried to use some of the adjectives in it; he also tried to explain what he meant by paraphrasing and using examples. He recorded himself so he could see how well he had done.

Afterwards, he thought he would organise the new vocabulary in his mind somehow. He looked at his notes and tried to group these words around certain themes, such as ‘Work’ – ‘Ambition’ – ‘Money’ etc. He felt this was helpful – it was like sorting out the new knowledge into separate ‘folders’ in his mind. In this way he believed it would be easier to remember the words later and they would be easier to retrieve too if he had to talk / write about this topic.

When he had finished studying for the day, he thought back to what he had done. He found it useful to try to glean lessons from each day’s work and try to draw up guidelines for himself – for future use. Some things had worked well while others had not. Perhaps he should allocate his time differently. He felt looking up words took up too much time, while organising the words in groups was faster and more fun. He thought aloud and recorded himself. In this way he could return to the recording later and listen to these instructions to himself.

Comments: Peter has made a number of interesting decisions here – not all of which are sound. The following comments are all based on research:

‘…He thought he would spend 2 hours on each…’ [Principle 1 – Interleaving]: Surprisingly, this is a mistake. Received wisdom is ‘Study the same thing over and over again, till you know it perfectly’. This is apparently wrong. After initially focusing on something so you can understand it properly, it pays to mix up your practice sessions. This ‘feels’ harder, but it pays great dividends in the long run. For instance, Peter here has to study Grammar and Vocabulary; instead of spending 2 hours on each, it would be a lot better if he spent, say,  30 min on Grammar and 30 on Vocabulary, then have a break and then repeat this four times. Every time Peter returns to Grammar (or Voc) studying will feel harder because things will not be ‘fresh’ on his mind; however retention will be better in the long run (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel 2014 – ch. 3).

‘…He thought he would give the gapped-text a try…’ [Principle 2 – Generation]: An excellent idea. Before getting input on how to solve a problem or how to do something it pays to try doing it first. This prepares the mind to receive new knowledge. For instance, before teaching your students how to write an e-mail, you may want to get them to write one. When they then see how an e-mail should be written, the differences will be much more noticeable to them. Similarly, before showing them how best to deliver a presentation, it makes sense to get them to try giving one without any instructions. Their uncertainty and possible frustration means they will pay closer attention when you actually show them how it is properly done. In this case, every time Peter comes across a gap he had been unable to fill, his mind will go ‘A-ha! So that’s the word!’ (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel 2014 – p. 4).

‘…He thought he would change his plan a little…’ [Principle 3 – Spacing]: This second plan is a lot better. Peter’s initial schedule was based on the idea of ‘massed practice’. Massed practice (cramming, studying for hours etc.) does not work. We think we are doing well, because it is all fresh in our mind, but this is just an illusion. Instead, it is much better to space out our practice (perhaps a few min at a time). This ‘feels’ harder, but it aids long-term retention and makes retrieval easier. Constantly going over the same material without allowing time for some ‘forgetting’ to set in, gives one an illusion of mastery, which is of course dispelled if we have to retrieve the same material after some time has elapsed. This paradoxical idea can be summed up in 3 words ‘Forget (in order) to Remember’! Spaced out practice feels frustrating, but it pays off long-term (Willingham 2009 – p. 119).

 ‘…He looked through his notes to see which word…’ [Principle 4 – Retrieval]: This is a mistake though. Traditional revision (i.e. re-studying, re-reading) does not work. What does work is forcing ourselves to retrieve information we have acquired. For instance, re-reading our vocabulary notes as Peter does here, is not of much help; trying to complete a gap-filled passage from memory on the other hand, is. The principle is the same whether we are trying to learn the causes of WW I, the principles behind rook endings in chess or key points we need to remember in lesson planning. Apparently, low-stakes testing is the best friend of learning! Quizzes, tests and attempts to actively recall information not only help reveal gaps in our knowledge, but they also help consolidate what we already know. It is the extra effort that does it; if it is not effortful, chances are it is superficial (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel 2014 – ch. 2).

 ‘…He imagined he was talking to a friend…’ [Principle 5 – Elaboration]: A brilliant idea! Peter uses a strategy called ‘Elaboration’. Elaboration involves  i) trying to relate new info to what you already know (e.g. ‘gregarious’ is similar to ‘sociable’ ) ii) explaining it to someone in your own words (e.g. trying to define a new word – ‘gregarious is someone who likes being with other people’)  iii) trying to relate new info to life outside class (e.g. ‘my friend John is gregarious’). Elaboration allows us to internalise the new material by incorporating it into our existing schemata through the creation of meaningful connections which make sense to us (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel 2014 – p. 207). Notice that Peter does not try to recreate the text; rather, he is trying to maximize the connections of the new material with his existing vocabulary. The more connections he can make, the more pathways will be created through which he will be able to retrieve the new items in the future.

‘…He thought aloud and recorded himself…’ [Principle 6 – Reflection]: Another excellent idea – though wrongly executed. Good students do what they have to do; better students go a step further: they think about what they have learned and how. We can encourage this by getting our students to ask themselves Qs like the following: ‘What did I learn today?’ / ‘What do I still need to learn?’ / ‘What went well?’ / ‘Which strategies do I like?’ / ‘What could I do differently next time?’ Reflection encourages active learning. It helps students become independent learners and it allows them to explore their preferences and personalize their learning routines by figuring out what learning methods they feel most comfortable with (Willingham 2009 – ch. 9). But the way Peter does it is sub-optimal; writing is much better; i) it is concrete – it forces us to put our meaning into words and  ii) it is easier to go through our notes afterwards (writing is ‘random access’).

6 Principles – 6 Takeaways

Here is a brief summary of the 6 principles mentioned above:

Interleaving: Mix up your practice. Alternate between different subjects.

Generation: Before you get the input, try solving the problem (doing the task) first.

Spacing: Avoid massed practice; allow long(ish) intervals between study periods.

Retrieval: Trying to retrieve information unaided is better than re-reading / studying notes.

Elaboration: Try to use new info and integrate it into what you already know.

Reflection: Think back to what you did, assess it and plan ahead.

Last words – What about us?: OK – you think all this has to do with learners, don’t you? This is exactly what I thought too. And then I got to page 240 in the BRM book. In it, the writers describe what happens during a typical weekend symposium for doctors: ‘…out of respect for participants’ busy schedules [this kind of training is usually] set at a hotel or resort, and structured around meals and PowerPoint lectures…’

Does this ring any bells? No? What about the last Professional Development event you attended? Any resemblance is ‘purely coincidental’ – and we are supposed to be teachers; we are supposed to be showing our learners how to learn. Yet as the writers point out, ‘the strategies of retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving are nowhere to be seen’! Organisers keep on doing the same thing year after year because that is how things were always done. But now we know better.

 

 

References

Brown, P., Roediger, H., McDaniel, M. (2014) Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge Massachusetts. Belknap Harvard.

Willingham, D. (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School?.  San Francisco, CA. Jossey-Bass.

14 Tips on Classroom Management and Motivation [1]

Tags

Classroom Management, Motivation, psychology, story

An annotated lesson: This made-up story is meant to be an exercise. A chance for you to test yourself. Just read through it and try to see whether you agree with the teacher’s decisions / practices. There are at least 14 interesting points in this short narrative. Can you spot them? If you agree with what John did, can you say why? If you think he has made a mistake, why do you think so? What should he have done instead? [NB: This is not meant to be a model lesson nor is John a model teacher; rather it is a collection of interesting moments from a lesson which help illustrate some good and some not so good practices relating to Classroom Management and Student Motivation].

John’s story: John walked confidently into the classroom. He was feeling great. He was really looking forward to this lesson. As soon as he went in he noticed that Peter was absent. ‘Where is Peter?’ he asked his friend Mark. ‘Oh, he’s just sent me a message’ said Mark ‘He is on his way’. ‘I really like Peter’ said John ‘He is always so cheerful – he brightens up the classroom.’

Then John turned to the class. ‘Hello everybody’, he said. ‘OK – as you have seen, I have written on the board what we are going to do today. Now – have you all got your H/W? Great. I’m so glad you are not like last year’s C2 group… I’m telling you – it was a good day when half of them did anything….’

‘OK – as I recall, you had to write an ad for an imaginary product. Hope you came up with some funny ideas… Right – what are you doing there mate? (John turned to Paul who was busily messaging someone – Paul put it away) OK you collect your friends’ H/W and put everything on my desk – now!’ John said smilingly. Paul stood to attention and saluted ‘Yes, sir!’ he said with a grin and promptly did so.

‘Right’ said John ‘we are going to work on a mini presentation, because it’s one of the best ways to develop your speaking skills. OK – I want you to work in groups. Group A – Group B – Group C’. (John showed the students which group each of them belonged to). ‘Group A: Imagine someone asks you for advice on how they can practice their Listening skills on their own. Make a note of as many strategies as you can; Group B: do the same thing for Reading skills; Group C: do the same thing for Speaking skills. Off you go’.

John went around monitoring the groups as they worked, helping with language as necessary. At some point he noticed that Mary in Group B was chatting to her friend Kate in the L1, so he moved closer to their table. On the way he noticed that Mark in Group A was trying to get the others to divide up the work. ‘Well done Mark’ he commented. ‘You have great organizational skills’. Mark smiled.

The people in Group C seemed to have finished their list and they were already rehearsing. ‘Wow!’ John said looking at their list ‘who came up with all these points?’ ‘Jane’ said her friend Helen. ‘Jane, you are one of the brightest students I’ve ever had! Well done!’ Jane beamed.

‘OK’ he said. ‘ This is the idea. We’ll take turns. One member from each group will stand up and give some tips to the rest of the class. You have to give as many tips as you can and explain why these ideas are good. Time limit: 2 min. Members of the other groups – you have to make notes of the main points’. John checked his instructions and then gave them a demonstration.

‘OK’ John said ‘Who would like to start? What about you Paul?’ John knew Paul was a little shy. He patted him on the shoulder ‘I know you can do it’ he said.

When they had finished, John told the class: ‘OK – so today we have looked at different strategies which people can use to improve their English. What would you like to do as H/W?’ The class came up with lots of ideas – they eventually settled on a mini presentation with ideas for Writing Skills development. ‘OK’ he said. ‘Make a note of this. Now – how long is the presentation going to be? By when will you have finished it? Do you think you should write it down or work from notes? What if there are words  / phrases you don’t know? Please make notes now’.

‘OK – John said. That’s it for today. Don’t forget you are sitting a mock test on Friday. But I’m sure you are all going to do very well. Well, at least I hope you are going to do better than Greg – a guy from last year’s group. “I don’t think I deserved zero on this test!” He once told me; “I agree” I said “but that’s the lowest mark I could give you!” ’ The students laughed and left – they knew John had made this up; he always liked to end the lesson with a little joke….

Comments: There are a number of interesting points in this story. Some are obvious, some are less so and some are counterintuitive. All of them are research-based:

‘…he brightens up the classroom.’…: Positive gossiping is a great idea for getting people to like you. Peter is certainly going to hear about this and research shows that we feel closer to people who like us. Not only that, but through ‘spontaneous trait transference’ people tend to associate with us the positive qualities we attribute to others! (Wiseman 2010 – p. 57).

‘…I have written on the board.’…: According to Willingham (2009 – p. 65) most items in Teacher Evaluation Forms are redundant. There are essentially two dimensions: i) how likeable the teacher is and  ii) how organized the lesson is. By putting up the main ideas on the board, John has shown students that he knows what he is doing and has given them a sense of purpose.

‘…it was a good day … did anything’…: This is a blunder though. Numerous studies have shown that our actions are influenced more by what others (esp our peers) do and much less by what we should do. By saying such a thing, essentially John is telling the class that it is standard practice not to do H/W. He has just shot himself in the foot! (Levitt & Dubner 2014 – p. 116).

‘…what are you doing there mate?’…: Ooops another mistake; one of omission this time. John is trying to establish camaraderie by being informal (a good idea) but he fails to use the student’s name. Research shows that using people’s first names is astonishingly effective in attracting their attention and inducing compliance (Martin, Goldstein & Cialdini 2014 – pp. 34-35).

‘…put everything on my desk’…: A missed opportunity. The task sounds great – surely students have come up with some creative ideas. Why not put them up on the wall for all to see? Ariely and others have discovered that when we work on something and other people do not get to see it, this is seriously demotivating (Ariely 2010 – pp. 63-74). Never mind what Maslow says about ‘self actualisation’; we want our work to be appreciated. (Watch this clip).

‘…because … speaking skills’…: It sounds funny, but when asking people to do something (provided it is a minor thing), using the word ‘because’ makes the request appear purposeful and greatly increases compliance. People simply assume that you have a reason for saying such a thing – even if the reason you give is a silly one (‘I need to use the Xerox machine because I need to make some copies’). ‘Because’ works like magic! (Levine 2006, p. 149).

‘…someone asks you for advice … on their own’…: This is pure ju-jitsu. Incredibly, studies have shown that when arguing in favour or against something, we tend to be influenced by what we ourselves say – even if someone has asked us to do so! (Sommers 2013 – p. 157). Never mind language practice in class; John is hoping that by arguing in favour of these strategies, the students will come to adopt them themselves!

…so he moved closer to their table…: Mere physical proximity is a very powerful tool for maintaining discipline in class. Simply moving closer to the source of (anticipated) disturbance is often enough to deal with any misbehaviours. This was clearly demonstrated in the classic ‘obedience to authority’ study by Milgram. When the researcher was close to the ‘teacher’ compliance rates were much higher (Wren 1999 – p. 7).

…‘You have great organizational skills’…: This is very good practice. The idea is to catch your students doing something good, praise them and give them a positive personality label (‘You are so considerate / helpful / organised etc.’). People are vain creatures. When someone gives us such a label we like it and then we try to live up to it. The label acts like a self-fulfilling prophecy! (Abelson, Frey & Gregg 2004 – p. 169).

‘…one of the brightest students I’ve ever had…’: But this is a mistake – and a very common one too. Dweck has carried out numerous studies which demonstrate that praising intelligence leads to a ‘fixed mindset’ (‘You are either intelligent or not – so there is no point trying’). Instead, we should focus on praising effort and try to encourage a ‘growth mindset’ (Dweck 2007 – Watch this clip).

… He patted him on the shoulder…: This detail is easy to miss and yet touching is extremely potent. Psychologist N. Gueguen has conducted a great many experiments which show that lightly touching someone on the upper arm greatly increases compliance (Yeung 2011 – pp. 68-69). Not only that – as Dunbar notes, touching also generates positive feelings at a subconscious level (Dunbar 2010 – p. 63).

‘…What would you like to do as H/W?’ …: The idea here is to get students to come up with the suggestion that the teacher would like to make. Actually, it is not that difficult; in this case for instance, the H/W follows naturally from the course of the lesson. What is important is that we tend to value ideas a lot more when we feel we have come up with them ourselves (Ariely 2010 – ch. 4. Watch this clip).

‘…how long is this going to be? [etc] …’: Excellent. Setting goals is great, but there is no guarantee people are going to follow through. Scientists have discovered however that adding details to intentions helps enormously (Duhigg 2012 – p. 143). Getting people to think about how they are going to implement their plans makes the latter more salient in their minds and ‘smooths the path’ by making them aware of obstacles which might have caused them to give up.

… to end the lesson with a little joke …: This is extremely important. Some fascinating studies by D. Kahneman (2011 – ch. 35) have shown that when evaluating a past event, we do not work out some kind of ‘average rating’; instead our memory retrieves two salient points: ‘peak’ moments (good or bad) and how the experience ended. Rather than ‘fading out’, John chooses to end his lesson with a bang. And it is this that will colour the students’ memory of the whole experience. (Watch this clip).

The takeaways – 14 Tips:

Here are the 14 takeaways. But wait – before reading them, can you recall at least 8? How would you phrase the tips in your own words? [Reflection helps with retention – enormously! (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel, 2014 – p. 59)]

Positive gossiping: Say nice things about your students behind their back. Their classmates are bound to tell them and they will like you more.

A sense of purpose: Show students that you have prepared for your lesson and you know what you are doing. They will respect you more and they will learn more.

Social proof: Do not advertise undesirable behaviour (e.g. ‘People are always turning up late’). You are encouraging your students to do the same thing.

First names: Learn and use your students’ first names. We know it is important, but it is even more important than we think.

Making H/W public: Make students’ H/W public (esp if it is something creative). They will work harder and it is hugely motivating.

The magic word: …is not ‘please’ – it’s ‘because’! Use it often; i) your rationale may not be obvious and ii) the use of ‘because’ increases compliance rates.

Self-persuasion: Get students to argue in favour of desirable behaviours. They may think this is just practice, but in fact they will be influencing themselves!

Proximity: When you sense there is (or there might be) discipline problems in class, just move closer to the source of the trouble. It can be very effective.

Labelling: Catch your students doing something good and then label them positively. The label often acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fixed mindsets: Avoid praising students for being intelligent. It leads to a ‘fixed mindset’ and it stops students from trying to get better.

Touching: Touch your students lightly. It can make them more amenable. (NB: I said touch them – not frisk them!)

The NIH bias: (NIH = ‘Not Invented Here’) If you want people to do something, get them to come up with the idea themselves.

Goal-setting: Get students to set goals for themselves and then get them to plan when, where and how they will accomplish them.

The peak-end effect: Make sure there is at least one memorable point during the lesson and if possible end on a high note. Do not just ‘fade out’.

Last words: I hope you found this exercise interesting. The idea is that the challenge plus the fact that these principles are woven together into a story will make all these points more memorable. Alas, I cannot take any credit for the idea; I pinched it (I’m sorry – I ‘creatively assimilated’ it) from Chabris & Simons 2010 – p. 229. I would be very interested in feedback as this is the first article of this kind I have written. Whatever you do, remember the last point. Save something nice for the end. It’s like dessert. Speaking of desserts, here is mine (just click here).

 

References

Abelson, R., Frey, K. & Gregg, A. (2004) Experiments With People. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Ariely, D. ( 2010) The Upside of Irrationality. London HarperCollins

Brown, P., Roediger, H., McDaniel, M. (2014) Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge Massachusetts. Belknap Harvard

Chabris, C. & Simons, D. (2010) The Invisible Gorilla. London: Harper Collins

Duhigg, C. (2012) The Power of Habit. London: Random House Books

Dunbar, R. (2010) How Many Friends does One Person Need? London: Faber & Faber 2010

Dweck, C. (2007) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine Books

Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Allen Lane

Levine, R. (2006) The Power of Persuasion. Oxford: Oneworld

Levitt, S. & Dubner, S. (2014) Think Like a Freak.  London: Allen Lane

Martin, S., Goldstein, N., & Cialdini, R. (2014) The Small Big. London: Profile Books

Sommers, S. (2013) Situations Matter. New York NY: Riverhead Books

Yeung, R. (2011) i is for Influence. London: Macmillan

Willingham, D. (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School?.  San Francisco, CA. Jossey-Bass

Wiseman, R. (2010) 59 Seconds. London: Pan Books

Wren, K. (1999) Social Influences. London: Routledge

Advertising – Creativity – Motivation

An ad with a twist:  Here is a task for you (and your students). This is an ordinary car advertisement. What are the features that make the car stand out according to the speaker? (Just click to watch the video below). OK – now confess: you did not expect the ending, did you? The casual viewer will just smile to him/herself and watch something else. But I would like to argue here that there is much more to this ad than meets the eye. What does this phenomenon (‘Change Blindness’) have to do with the car? Did the advertisers use this device simply to intrigue us? I do not think so. Read on.

‘The Strike and the Hit’:  In his fantastic book ‘Great Customer Experiences’ M. Watkinson mentions an interesting distinction made by the great samurai and duelist Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi said that when you aim a blow at someone and you injure them, this is a ‘strike’; but if you injure them by accident during the duel, this is a ‘hit’. Watkinson claims that this distinction is also relevant when looking at many big companies: the products they design are the result of a long process or research and purposeful development and they are often very good (a ‘strike’); however, when it comes to the customer experience, most companies do not deliberately set out to deliver something good, so when they do, that is a ‘hit’ (as in ‘hit and miss’ – Watkinson 2013, p. xi)

Musashi and ELT: I believe something similar is true in the field of ELT: when it comes to designing lessons or coaching our students about the best way to study, we are good. This is our domain and we know what we are doing (a ‘strike’). When it comes to using Psychology in class however, it is a different matter. Experienced teachers do have an intuitive ‘sense’ of what might work best on many occasions, but I believe that even they would have some difficulty articulating the principles on which their practice is based. If something goes well, it is a ‘hit’. And I believe that with less experienced teachers, the ‘misses’ may well outnumber the ‘hits’. So this is the idea: why not learn from the experts? Why not see what advertising can teach us?

5 Ads – 5 Principles. In what follows I am going to look at 5 advertisements / campaigns and try to isolate the one key principle which I believe the advertisers exploited in order to achieve the effect they desired. In each case I will also recommend a specific activity which shows how we can make use of the same principle in the classroom.

Key Element Number 1 – Social Currency: So what about that Skoda commercial? In his great book ‘Contagious’, (2013) J. Berger looks at the elements which make something ‘go viral’. His studies have identified 6 such key traits and one of these is what he calls ‘Social Currency’. This is the quality of things to make us look good. For instance, when we share an interesting piece of gossip, this makes us look good as it suggests we have some ‘inside knowledge’. When we share a good joke with our friends, this may make them to want to hang out with us. It is the same with interesting or counterintuitive pieces of knowledge When we tell people that there are snakes which fly or carnivorous plants which can actually eat mice or small lizards that reflects well on us, so we do it. This is also the reason why people will often exaggerate certain elements about their experiences and why things tend to ‘grow in the telling’ (this often happens subconsciously and Berger quotes research in which this phenomenon has been tested in the lab [Berger 2013, p. 41]).

How can we use this element in class? The answer here is simple: we can give students interesting material to read/watch – stuff they would be interested in even if they were not in class. For instance, when I give my student a text about ‘pupil dilation’ (Pease & Pease 2004, p. 166) I don’t have to motivate them to read it; as soon as they hear that this is a fool-proof way of telling whether someone finds them attractive, my problem is how to get them to stop reading! In the same way, many of my students have made a note of the link of the Skoda car ad in order to share it with their friends. To exploit this principle in class, we can use a simple info-gap activity; it’s the content that makes the difference (to see an example, just click here).

Key Element Number 2 – Sociality: Imagine this is your first day at college. You feel a little awkward and lonely in this new environment. Would it not be great if somehow you could find an excuse to strike up a conversation and make new friends? (Click to watch the ad campaign).

This brilliant idea makes use of our need for social connection. M. Lieberman has conducted some fascinating studies on this and he discovered that we are hard-wired to crave sociality. In fact, this is so important for us that when our brains do nothing a special area is activated which just happens to be the one that processes social relationships (Lieberman has called this the ‘default network’ – Lieberman 2013 – p. 16). When doing nothing else, nature wants us to think about our relationship with others. The reason for this is that we are a species of social primates and social exclusion would have meant certain death in our ancestral environment. Our ancestors are the ones who played their ‘social cards’ right, which is why even today we obsess about the minor tiffs we may have with our friends and we can get paranoid if we feel our colleagues are giving us the cold shoulder.

How can we use this element in class? The implication here is clear: any activity which gets students working together is likely to motivate them, help them learn better and make them happier too. ‘Humanistic’ activities which require students to work in pairs or groups are particularly good. For instance, we could ask students to write the name of a famous person on a post-it note and stick it on the forehead of their partner. The latter then has to ask up to 20 Yes/No questions to discover their identity (e.g. ‘Am I alive?’ / ‘Am I male?’ etc.) We can even take this activity a step further by asking our students to point out any similarities or differences between themselves and the celebrity they have just identified (e.g. ‘Napoleon was very ambitious and so am I’ or ‘Marilyn Monroe was very attractive to members of the opposite sex about 50 years ago and this was also the case with me’ 🙂 ).

Key Element Number 3 – Identity: In this fantastic campaign, faced with market indifference, Rom (the traditional Romanian chocolate-maker) came up with a very clever trick… (Click to watch the video).

What the Rom people played upon in this campaign was people’s sense of national identity. This tendency of humans to identify with a group and want to belong to something larger rather themselves appears to be innate. In his great book ‘The Righteous Mind’ Moral Psychologist J. Haidt claims that we have evolved to have certain moral predispositions – the ones that would help us survive and reproduce. According to him, our moral make up is 90% chimp and 10% bee (Haidt 2012 – Ch. 10). We are mostly chimps, obsessed with status and getting ahead; but there is a part of us that has evolved to be altruistic – a ‘hivish’ part. Under the right circumstances, that part takes over and the group becomes more important than ourselves. Haidt argues that we can make use of these tendencies to get people to work together and to increase their motivation. A good example of this is the way students were divided up into ‘Houses’ at Hogwarts in Rowlings’ Harry Potter books. Notice that Ron and Harry for instance did not feel any particular animosity towards the other students – they just felt proud of belonging to their own particular House.

How can we use this element in class? Our ‘hivish’ tendencies can be dangerous – it is this feature of ours that sometimes lead to nationalism and xenophobia. However, in the Rom campaign there were no hard feelings against other groups – just pride in being Romanian. I believe this is something we can exploit in nationally / culturally uniform groups. The recipe is simple: we find something on the internet which is favourable towards the group’s identity. (OK – here is the interesting bit… 🙂 ) We then change the text so that it says exactly the opposite! Next we show the altered text to our students and we ask them for a response – perhaps by contributing a comment to a blog. The students usually do not mind that and their comments are often angry. Once they have finished, we then show them the real text. The students are usually so elated, they are prepared to write yet more comments – this time to praise the writer! Here is an example of such an activity (click here).

Key Element Number 4 – Emotion: In this ad, a number of children come up with the second part of a 2nd Conditional ‘If Clause’. But what is the 1st part? (click below to watch the ad).

The ad is very moving as it is meant to be, and the reason is that it plays on our emotions. In his excellent booklet ‘Emotion’ (2001) D. Evans explains how evolution has given us two distinct ways of processing reality: one fast, one slow. To adapt to a changing environment we use reason (‘OK – what do I do here?’). Reason is slow – we weigh up the facts to come up to a (hopefully sound) decision. For the important things in life however, nature has given us emotions. Emotions are immediate, powerful and beyond our control. If you were to see a lion a few meters ahead, nature did not design me to stop and think, but rather to scramble up the nearest tree – pronto! Because emotions deal with the important things in life (attraction, fear, anger, jealousy) our brain ‘tags’ emotional experiences (‘Remember this!’). For this reason, emotionally-laden experiences are far more memorable than ordinary ones, and this is something that advertisers exploit again and again.

How can we use this element in class? As Evans says (2001 – p. 63) one of the most powerful technologies that we have come up with for altering our emotional states is music. It follows then that one of the easiest ways to make activities memorable is to use music / songs in class. The following activity is both easy to use and extremely effective. Students listen to short clips taken from silent movie soundtracks and make very brief notes of the kind of images that come to their mind (click here to listen to the clips). Then they can simply share what they have imagined with the person next to them (the differences are often quite interesting). Alternatively, students could write a short paragraph describing the images that the music triggers in their mind; the teacher can collect these pieces of writing and put them up on the wall. The students could walk around and try to guess who wrote what.

Key Element Number 5 – Incongruity: In this ad, an employee thinks that using FedEx is costly, but his colleagues soon put him right. It turns out that he is wrong in other things as well… 🙂 (click below to watch the ad).

Why do we find this ad amusing? The answer is of course the incongruity of some of the things Ned seems to believe. In investigating the factors which can contribute to ‘instant persuasion’ K. Dutton (2010 – p. 215) came up with an interesting acronym: SPICE. Incongruity is the 3rd key factor. The reason it is so potent according to Dutton is that in order not to be drowned in the ‘noise’ of external stimuli, our brains operate for the most part in ‘autopilot’ – it screens out most things (remember the Skoda ad?), yet it remains alert and it instantly focuses our attention on something if it stands out in some way (in the ancestral environment, this could have been a potential threat – or an opportunity). Incongruity makes use of this mechanism. Having attracted our attention with these paradoxical statements, the advertisers then follow up with the slogan which now ‘registers’.

How can we use this element in class? Well, one implication is clearly that we can utilize incongruity to help our students ‘refocus’ if we notice that their eyes are beginning to glaze over. But the reason I chose this ad is that there is something else which is special about it. The dialogue framework could have been used to promote any idea – not just a courier service. This I believe is perfect for encouraging student creativity. We can give them a ‘framework’ and let them come up with ideas of their own. This is a key insight: supplying our students with a framework may actually boost their creativity rather than allowing them complete freedom – in the latter case, the decisions to be made are so many that the mind is exhausted before it comes to the creative part of the exercise (Heath & Heath 2008, p. 22). To see an example of how we could do this in class, click here.

Last words: Archeologists believe that the wheel was invented only once and then it spread around the world; however I believe it has been invented multiple times – in ELT. The reason is that our field is mostly insular; we tend to look for insights within our domain. But why not open up to other influences? Advertising has a great deal to teach us. Consider the following quote: “Creativity without strategy is called ‘Art’. Creativity with strategy is called ‘Advertising’.” (Jef. Richards) Great! If this is true, then we are all advertisers. Now – let us see what we can learn from our colleagues….

PS – Read this:  I could not possibly finish without mentioning the best book on the subject, namely Ferrier’s excellent ‘The Advertising Effect’ (Oxford 2014). Ferrier, a trained Psychologist, looks at how advertising makes use of our evolved psychological traits to influence us and get us to change – not necessarily in a bad way. 🙂 The book presents a carefully selected list of ingredients for motivating people and it is packed full of actual case studies. Strongly recommended.

 

References

Berger, J. (2013) Contagious. London: Simon & Schuster

Dutton, K. (2010) Flipnosis: The Art of Split-second Persuasion. London: Random House

Evans, D. (2001) Emotion: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press

Ferrier, A. (2014) The Advertising Effect. South Melbourne, Oxford University Press

Haidt, J. (2012) The Righteous Mind. London: Allen Lane

Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2008) Made to Stick. London: Random House

Lieberman, M. (2013) Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Pease, A. & Pease, B. (2004) The Definitive Book of Body Language. London: Orion

Watkinson, M. (2013) The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences. London: Financial Times Publishing

 

Psychology and ELT – Story-Generating Activities

‘Getting learners to do what comes naturally to them’

Geometric Thriller: Look at the screen below. What do you see inside the frame? Well, clearly, there is an open box and three geometric shapes: a large triangle, a smaller one and a small circle. What happens however if these shapes start moving about? Will you still see them as small, 2D objects moving about on a screen? If so, you are a rare person indeed! But do not take my word for it; just click on play and watch the 90 second film for yourself. Chances are, what you are going to see is a story – perhaps like this one 1. In the original study (Heider & Simmel 1944) what 33 out of the 34 subjects saw was a true thriller! But how does this happen?

Gazzaniga’s Experiments: In a series of fascinating experiments, Michael Gazzaniga discovered ‘the interpreter’ – a neural circuit which helps to organise a person’s experience into a meaningful whole. Gazzaniga worked with split-brain patients. These people had undergone operations which had severed the corpus callosum which links the two brain hemispheres. Researchers had pictures briefly flashed in front of either the left or the right eye (this information is conveyed to the right or left hemisphere respectively).

In one case, the patient was shown a chicken claw (L hemisphere) and was asked to pick a picture with his R hand. He chose that of a chicken. When asked why, he correctly pointed out the link between the claw and the bird. Then he was shown a snowy scene (R hemisphere) and once again was asked to pick a picture. He picked that of a shovel. When asked why however, his R brain could not reply, because the verbal functions are mostly located in the other hemisphere! Here comes the interesting bit: the L hemisphere (which controls language) had no idea why the subject had picked the shovel, but it made up an explanation nevertheless on the basis of the information it had!! The patient said ‘Well… you need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop!’ Amazing!!

Time and again the researchers got the same results; when they flashed a card which read ‘Walk’ to the R hemisphere, the patient got up and started walking. When asked why, he did not know of course but ‘the interpreter’ in the L hemisphere made up a reason just the same – ‘I’m going to get a Coke!’ (studies described in McRaney 2012, p. 19).

Implications for ELT: So here is the idea: it appears that this ‘interpreter’ – the module which ‘connects the dots’ into a coherent whole is part of the ‘standard equipment’ of the human brain. Not only that; because such an ability was so useful to us, nature has fitted us with a reward mechanism, so we get a neuro-chemical reward every time we manage to do so (Ramachandran & Hirstein 1999). It follows therefore that activities which use a range of stimuli to encourage learners to come up with stories should be both pleasurable and ones which come naturally to them. Here are six examples:

Warm-up activities 1: Many of the texts we give our students to read are in fact stories. To get our students interested and prepare them for reading by activating their mental schemata we can select a few key words and get the students in pairs to come up with their own version of what happened. That will provide them with the motivation to read the text in order to see how accurate their predictions were. This is a very versatile activity and requires very little preparation.

Warm-up activities 2: This is a more sophisticated version of the above, particularly suitable for listening texts. Using simple editing tools (e.g. ‘Audacity’), we can cut some sentences from the text and get students to listen to them in random order (alternatively we can just type them up and give them to the students). Then they have to work together to sequence them and once again speculate about what might have happened in the story (e.g. Vince 1992, p. 44).

Ambiguous stories: In this activity, students are given a set of pictures, where the sequence is not obvious. Students have to decide on a plausible order and write up the story. They can then read their story aloud and their partner / their classmates can arrange the pictures in the right order as the story unfolds. Alternatively each student can come up with his/her own version and compare it with that of their classmates (Ur 1988, p. 219).

Creative story writing 1: In this fantastic activity, students are given ideas for the beginning and the end of a story (e.g. Beginning: ‘A hiking holiday’ – ending: ‘A first prize’) and many words / phrases in-between some of which are connected together in a grid. Students can  choose different ‘routes’ (e.g. ‘A hiking holiday’ – ‘an accident’ – ‘a wedding’ – ‘something found’ etc. etc. … – ‘a first prize’) and in the end they can again compare their version to that of their classmates (Grellet, 1996, p. 120)

Creative story writing 2: This is a more interactive version of the above. Students are told they are going to write fairy tales. They work in pairs. Each student is given a picture of an object (e.g. a ring). They have to write 2-3 sentences and try to include the object somehow. Then they swap stories with the person next to them. Their partner has to continue the story while including a new object. After 2-3 sentences the process is repeated, until in the end students are given some time to finish off the story any way they like.

Sounds into story: Although this idea is an old one, it still has great novelty value as it is very different from all the others. Students listen to a sequence of sounds (e.g. an engine starting, a cat meowing, a window smashing, etc.) They then have to try to figure out what happened and write down the story (if you want to try this with your class, just click here). There are many variations of this idea (e.g. Maley & Duff 1975) and nowadays of course sound effects are readily downloadable, which means that teachers can easily create their own sequences.

From Thrillers to Romance: OK – here is something else you can use with your students  (‘Watch this ad, then write the story!’) As Berger (2013 – p. 115) explains, Google wanted to show people how easy it is to use their engine to find just about everything. So in this beautiful ad we follow a young American who travels to Paris in order to study. Upon getting there, he looks for a café nearby… and then his whole life changes. The ad is short, sweet and hugely popular (7.5 m hits and counting!). Like a treasure hunt, the carefully selected clues lead the viewer to effortlessly reconstruct what happened. The ad cost next to nothing and yet it was voted best Super Bowl commercial for 2010.  That speaks volumes about the power of stories….

1 “The small triangle and the small circle (the couple) enter the screen together and the big triangle (the villain) storms out of his house. The big triangle violently butts the little guy (small triangle) out of the way and herds the protesting heroine (small circle) back into his house. The big triangle then chases the circle back and forth trying to work her into a corner. The scene reeks of sexual menace…” (Gottschall 2012 – p. 106)

References

Berger, J. “Contagious” Simon & Schuster 2013

Boyd, B. “On the Origin of Stories” Harvard University Press 2010

Gottschall, J. “The Storytelling Animal” Houghton Mifflin 2012

Grellet, F. “Writing for Advanced Learners of English” Cambridge 1996

Heider, F. & Simmel, M. “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behaviour” American Journal of Psychology 57 (1944): 243-259

Maley, A. & Duff A. “Sounds Interesting” Cambridge 1975

McRaney, D. “You are not so Smart” Oneworld 2012

Ramachandran and Hirstein ‘The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience’ Journal of Consciousness Studies 1999

Ur, P. “Grammar Practice Activities” Cambridge 1988

Vince, M. “Highlight Intermediate” Heinemann 1992

Communication 1 – Maximising Effectiveness

‘How can we communicate effectively?’

Communication 101 – Mission Statements:  “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place” said G. B. Shaw the Great – and he was on to something… Communication should be simple. You have something to say – go ahead and say it! Yet time and again we find that our message can be ineffective, clunky and sometimes even incomprehensible. Take mission statements for instance; do you know your company’s mission statement? If you do, is it clear? Is it effective? Is it inspiring? Watch the amazing Dan Heath talking about the two criteria any good mission statement should meet.

OK – so now you know: it has to be concrete and it has to give a reason.  In what follows we take a look at four ways of making the way we communicate more persuasive. We will be focusing on how we ‘pitch’ what we have to offer to prospective customers, but the ideas discussed here are more generally applicable.

Over to you: Before moving on, let us stay with Dan Heath for a while. Chances are you do not know your company’s Mission Statement… Well, here is your chance to draft one yourself in the light of Dan Heath’s advice…

The Serious Side of Subjects: Naturally, you do not read all the e-mails you get, do you? But what is it that might make you open one e-mail but not another? Researchers have looked into this (Wainer, Dabbish & Kraut 2011) – in one study by asking participants to go through their e-mails using the ‘think-aloud method’. It turns out that subject lines are very important. Apparently, the best among them have to do with one of two factors: a) Utility – ‘Does this have something to do with me?’ (e.g. ‘Win a scholarship for the next IATEFL Conference’) or b) Curiosity – ‘What’s this?’ (e.g. ‘The one Web tool to rule them all!’) As Pink (2013) points out, research shows that these two do not mix well, so a successful subject line would have to use one or the other of the two approaches. A third key factor is Specificity. The more specific the subject is, the better. So a line like ‘Feedback and its importance’ is too ‘wooly’ compared to ‘Five top Feedback tips’.

Over to you: Imagine you want to send an e-mail to prospective customers/clients about one of the products/services of your company. How would you phrase the subject line in light of the above?

Terrific Tweets: All you Tweeters – take heed! Researchers set up a site (‘Who Gives a Tweet?’!!) and asked Twitter users to evaluate other people’s tweets (Andre, Bernstein & Luther 2012).. Their findings were fascinating; first of all, about 65% of all tweets were rated from neutral to bad (read: ‘not worth reading’; hardly surprising really, if Facebook posts are anything to go by!) Buy it was the specific findings which were the most interesting: Worst tweets: Complaints (‘Flight delayed’) / Me Now (‘Just woke up’) / Presence Maintenance (‘Hi all!’). But what about the best ones? a) Tweets asking followers to respond (‘What is the one trait a good teacher should have?’) / b) Info and links (‘Check out this amazing article!’) / c) Self-promotion tweets (provided they offer some useful info! – e.g. ‘Here is my latest clip on YouTube in the “Comedy for ELT” series’!)

Over to you: Pink says the best tweets are 120 characters long (so that others can re-tweet them). Think about your company. Can you create a 120-character tweet informing potential customers/clients about a new product/service your company has launched?

Pitching with Pixar:  Pixar is a huge success story in the field of animation entertainment. If your 13 feature films have grossed $ 7.6 bn, that means that you are doing something really well! And what Pixar does well is…tell stories! Stories have enormous persuasion potential (Heath & Heath 2008), which is hardly surprising since some researchers believe we are pre-wired for the story format (Gottschall 2012). So, let us see how Pixar does it. According to Emma Coats, a former Pixar employee, all Pixar films can be reduced to the same basic model: “Once upon a time …………….. Every day, ……………..  One day, ……………… Because of that,  …………….. Because of that, …………….. Until finally ……………..” (Pixar Touch Blog – May 2011). Yet this format is not only useful to film animators; we can use exactly the same template to tell people about what we have to offer!

Over to you: Think about your company – can you create a ‘story’ explaining how things can change for your customers/clients as a result of using your company’s products/services?

A Reason to Rhyme:  Look at these statements: ‘Life is mostly strife’ and ‘Life is mostly struggle’. Aren’t they virtually identical? And what about these two: ‘Caution and measure will win you treasure’ as opposed to ‘Caution and measure will win you riches’? Well, the message in each pair may be the same but there is in fact a difference. When subjects were asked to rate such statements on how accurately they depicted human behaviour, the rhyming statements got much higher marks!! This is yet another manifestation of the power of a phenomenon known as ‘fluency’ (= ‘ease of processing’). What we have here is a spill-over effect; amazingly, the ease with which we can say/process something makes us think that it is more accurate/truthful! (Mc Glone, & Tofighbakhsh 2000).

Over to you: Think about your company – can you create a rhyme which describes what it does or what is special about its products or services?

Last words – Don’t do this: What is wrong with this statement? “We are leveraging our assets and establishing strategic alliances to create a robust knowledge centre…(etc., etc.) – apparently this means: ‘We are consultants’! Time and again people try to impress their audience/readers by means of jargon, convoluted structures and over-elaborate language. The idea is that the writer/speaker will come across as knowledgeable and authoritative and his/her message will consequently seen as more persuasive. Research however shows that this often backfires; the processing difficulty spills over to the content which is perceived as less convincing! (Goldstein, Martin & Cialdini 2007) Here is one of my favourite examples – from an Art Gallery Programme: “…Each mirror imaginatively propels its viewer forward into the seemingly infinite progression of possible reproductions that the artist’s practice engenders, whilst simultaneously pulling them backwards in a quest for the ‘original’ source of referent that underlines Levine’s oeuvre’.” No comments… 🙂

[NB 1: For a printable version of this article (with Teacher’s notes and sample responses at the end) just click here].

[NB 2: This article was first published in the IATEFL BESIG Newsletter].

References

Andre, P. Bernstein, M & Luther, K. “Who Gives a Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value” paper presented at the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Co-operative Work (February 2012)

Goldstein, N., Martin, S. & Cialdini, R. “Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion”  Profile Books 2007

Gottschall, J. “The Storytelling Animal” Houghton Mifflin 2012

Heath, C. & Heath, D. “Made to Stick” Random House 2008

Mc Glone, M. & Tofighbakhsh J. “Birds of a Feather Flock Conjointly (?): Rhyme as Reason in Aphorisms” Psychologcial Science 11, no 5 (September 2000) pp 424-428

Pink, D. “To Sell is Human” Canongate 2013

“Pixar Story Rules (One Version)” Pixar Touch Blog (May 2011)

Wainer, J. Dabbish, L. & Kraut, R. “Should I Open this Email? Inbox-Level Cues, Curiosity and Attention to Email” Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (May 2011)

Observation vs Experience

“You can see what it’s like, can’t you?”

Down and Out: ‘What should I write about?’ a budding young writer named George Orwell once asked. ‘Write about what you know’ came the reply. But Orwell wanted to write about poverty. And he did not know much about it. So he thought he would find out. He became a tramp in London and later lived a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris. The descriptions in his book ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ are so vivid the book is hard to read at times… Since then others have tried a similar approach – exploring things ‘from the inside’ *. Now for some of us the poor may inhabit a different universe, as perhaps we do not happen to know any of them ourselves; yet there are other people close to us about whose life we know very little. Take people in wheelchairs for instance. What does it feel like to be one of them? In this amazing ad, everyone appears to be having fun, but what happens when the game is over?

 

The wheelchair experience:  When I first saw this commercial I was immediately struck by the similarities it has with a study conducted by Clore & Jeffrey in 1972. In it, a group of students were asked to imagine that as a result of an accident they had lost the use of their legs and were confined to a wheelchair. For one hour, they had to follow a pre-deterimined route, which involved the participants having to negotiate lifts, doors and ramps. Each of these students was followed by another one whose task was to observe everything the former did and every difficulty s/he faced. The idea behind the study was to see whether this one-hour experiment would make a difference in the attitude of these two groups towards people with disability and related issues, such as whether it would be advisable to spend money on making it easier for such people to get about.

Once the whole thing was over, each student was interviewed separately. The results were most interesting: compared to a control group, the ‘observers’ showed a marked increase in their sensitivity towards the difficulties people in wheelchairs face. Yet, the increase among those students who had had the ‘hands on’ experience was higher still! But would this change persist over time? The researchers looked into that too. Four months later, they interviewed the students again over the telephone. Hidden among the many questions they asked them were ones designed to measure just that. Amazingly, among the people who had actually used the wheelchair themselves the attitudinal change had remained the same! (So – hats off to those who came up with this Guiness ad…).

Applications in the field of ELT: The moral of this study is quite obvious: experience beats simple observation – hands down (watching a chef on TV effortlessly conjuring up a chocolate soufflé is one thing; doing the same thing yourself is quite another!). A less obvious point here is that the increased awareness experience confers appears to be long-lasting. Naturally, this has a number of implications for EL teachers:

Activities: Time and again I have been in practical workshops where the participants are reluctant to actually try out the activities themselves (‘Yes, yes, we can see how this task works…’); then there are instances where the presenter refrains from asking colleagues to do things for fear that s/he may be seen to be talking down to them. I must say I find such attitudes more than a little puzzling. As I see it, the best way to understand an activity is to experience it as though you were the learner (Nunan & Lamb 1996). If I had to choose between workshops and lectures, my vote would go to the former any day!

Technology: While on the subject of workshops, here is another amazing discovery from the field of Psychology: if something is hard to imagine, people tend to assume it will not happen! (Kenrick et al [eds] 2012 – p. 43). This seems completely irrational, but it seems that there is a ‘spill over’ effect at work; our brain translates the difficulty in processing something into decreased likelihood of it actually taking place! I have often see this in talks on technology; the expert starts talking excitedly about their favourite Web 2.0 tool and then three minutes later the eyes of the audience just glaze over. They cannot see themselves using this kind of innovative technology and their brain simply rejects it. I firmly believe that ‘hands on’ experience (workshops!) would greatly increase uptake.

Peer observation:  How do we know what our lessons are really like? We think we do, but of course we are too busy teaching to consider what things must seem like from the point of view of the students. Solutions to this include reflective practices such as keeping a journal or recording our lessons and then going through them with the help of certain observational tools (e.g. Wajnryb 1993). Yet that still leaves one problem – ‘The Curse of Knowledge’ (Heath & Heath 2008). The thing is that, naturally, we know both what we had intended to teach and what we meant every time we said something. But would things be just as clear for others? It seems much better to have a colleague occasionally observe us – as a learner. Their feedback is likely to be invaluable (see for instance Edge 1992).

The learner’s perspective: It has been argued by many that one of the best ways for us to grow as professionals is to start looking at things from the learner’s perspective. The easiest way to do this, is to become learner ourselves. Using our imagination is not quite the same; having to actually deal with the difficulties learners face and experiment with the techniques and strategies we keep telling our students to use can help us appreciate their problems and frustrations and see what actually works in practice. Some people have taken this idea further, arguing that it does not really matter what it is that you are trying to learn; what makes the difference is finding yourself in the learner’s position – even if what you may be learning is chess or dancing or sailing (e.g. Claypole 2010, p. 56).

The teacher’s perspective 1 [The learner]: Conversely, it can potentially be even more beneficial if learners adopt the role of the teacher (Dornyei 2001). A number of researchers have stressed the benefits this might have for students on the cognitive domain – it seems that different neural circuits are involved and so retention of information is better (e.g. Lieberman 2013 [to watch a short clip on this just click here]). Yet what people often fail to notice is that placing the student in the role of the teacher makes the former more aware of the challenges involved in the role. In the same way that becoming a learner can make a teacher more empathic, taking on the role of the teacher can help students become more mature.

The teacher’s perspective 2 [The DOS]: Following the same logic, just as a teacher may forget what it is like to be a learner, a DOS may gradually come to lose touch with the day-to-day challenges a teacher faces. In my view, much of the friction between the management and the teachers in large schools arises because the DOS is so focused on his/her new duties that s/he often fails to see things from the front-line teacher’s perspective (a dimension often neglected in otherwise excellent books – e.g. Impey & Underhill 1994). This gap is often easier to spot in the case of some academics who do not actually teach the language themselves (and in some cases, they never have). Regardless of how sound their research might be, one often has the feeling that when it comes to teaching implications, some of their suggestions would never work in real life. The moral here is that no matter how good an idea / practice looks on paper, a dry run is indispensable.

Back to wheelchairs:  Having discussed the advantages of experience over observation, I would like to go back to people in wheelchairs for a moment. What is life like for them? Things we hardly give a second thought to can become a huge challenge for them. How do you get on a bus without help? How do you go up the stairs to get inside a building? How do you even get across the street where there are no special ramps? Well, now we can find out more. And our students can too. The Disabled Access Friendly is a campaign launched by people in the ELT world. Their site ** (which recently won a prestigious ELTON award) boasts an impressive array of ready-made materials for all levels which can both help improve our students’ English and sensitise them to the problems people with mobility problems face every day. So – please visit the site and try out some of the materials. And if you get the chance, give yourself a ride on that wheelchair…

[An earlier version of this article was published in the magazine ‘Modern English Teacher’ (Vol 22 – July 2013)]

*   A striking example is that of Norah Vincent, a lesbian journalist who spent a year dressed as a man to get an insider’s view of the male world.

** To visit the DAF site, just click here.

References

Clore, G. L. & Jeffrey, K. M. (1972) ‘Emotional role playing, attitude change and attraction towards a disabled person’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 105-11

Claypole, M. ‘Controversies in ELT’ LinguaBooks 2010

Dornyei, Z. “Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom” Cambridge 2001

Edge, J. “Cooperative Development” Longman 1992

Heath, C. & Heath, D. “Made to Stick” Random House 2008

Impey, G. & Underhill, N. “The ELT Manager’s Handbook” Heinemann 1994

Kenrick, D., Goldstein, N. & Braver, S. “Six Degrees of Social Influence” Oxford 2012

Lieberman, M. “Social” Oxford 2013

Nunan, D. & Lamb, C. “The Self-Directed Teacher” Cambridge University Press 1996

Orwell, G. “Down and Out in Paris and London” Penguin Classics 2001

Vincent, N. “Self-made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man” Atlantic Books 2006

Wajnryb, R. “Classroom Observation Tasks” Cambridge University Press 1993

The Forer Effect

‘Let me tell you who you really are’

Three Men in a Boat:  Has this ever happened to you? You find yourself waiting outside the doctor’s surgery and you are idly browsing through the magazines there when you come across an ad for a new medicine or medical exam. You go through the symptoms and all of a sudden it dawns on you – you have them all! OK – this is from the opening page of ‘3 Men in a Boat’, where the main character describes how he discovered he was suffering from practically every known disease (except housemaid’s knee). It is meant to be funny, but the reason we tend to smile is that we recognize the grain of truth in all this; we tend to relate everything to ourselves. And if this is true when we read some general symptoms, it is even more true when we read something about ourselves – especially if it happens to be positive. Astrologers of course know all about this – just watch this short clip…

 

The Forer Effect:  In 1948, psychologist R. Forer actually did an experiment resembling the one in the video. He gave his students a personality test and then an analysis – ostensibly on the basis of their responses. The analysis contained such items as ‘You have a great need for other people to like and admire you’ or ‘You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage’ or ‘At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved’. Does anything strike you about these statements? That’s right – they are true of everybody. Notice also the element of flattery in the second and the use of the key phrase ‘at times’ in the third – you simply cannot go wrong!  If they sound like the kind of stuff one might expect to find in astrology charts, that’s because they are – Forer had lifted them verbatim from an astrology book. When asked to rate how closely the description matched their character, the students gave it 4.26 out of 5! No surprises there… (Forer 1948).

There are three main reasons why this phenomenon is so powerful:

i) We are extremely self-focused. As Fine (2005) points out, the human brain is vain. We tend to relate everything that is happening to ourselves. No wonder then that when told that we are ‘kind’ for instance, we tend to think of incidents which confirm this without pausing to think whether it could equally well apply to others.

ii) We are programmed to try to find connections. Even where none exist (Ramachandran 2012 – p. 228) . Thus when we are informed that we are ‘creative’, we might for instance connect this with our ability to try out different approaches at work (which some might label as ‘resourcefulness’) rather than to our non-existent artistic propensities.

iii) We focus on ‘hits’ and ignore the ‘misses’. If told that we like ‘being with friends and having a good time’ we are likely to remember the two occasions when we went to parties and did enjoy ourselves and forget that these were the only occasions within the past decade (Gilbert 2007).

Applications in the field of ELT:   Given these all-too-human tendencies, it should be extremely easy to get people talking about themselves and others. As teachers, we can make use of this fact in order to help our learners develop their reading and speaking skills and (very importantly) help them learn all sorts of words and expressions related to personality. I have found the following activities extremely popular with my learners:

A walk in the woods: This is an amazing activity. Students listen to some instructions (see the clip below). They are then asked to make brief notes of what the scene is like and to describe various items. This is supposed to reveal something about their ‘inner self’. Then they listen to someone providing an analysis of the personality of someone who has completed this task (same clip – after 2:45). Then the students, working in pairs, analyse each other’s personality on the basis of what they heard earlier and discuss how accurate this is. Variations of this activity can easily be found on the web (e.g. here).

Graphology: Graphology is supposed to be able to deduce things about our personality on the basis of our handwriting. This task is simplicity itself. Students work in pairs. You ask each of them to write a short paragraph on a white sheet of paper (without lines). They then pass it to their partner. Once the writing is done, you give each student some short paragraphs which explain what certain elements of our handwriting reveal about us (e.g. ‘Size: large letters show seriousness and generosity’ or ‘Slant: if your writing slopes upwards it means you are ambitious and optimistic’). Students then take it in turns to interpret each other’s handwriting on the basis of the information they have got. Once again this is something one can easily find on the web (e.g. here).

Doodling: This is a similar activity, the only difference being that instead of asking someone to write something, this time they are asked to just make some doodles. The ‘expert’ then looks at these doodles and tells the other person what certain elements might mean (e.g. ‘flowers and animals might mean you are in love’ or ‘confused lines mean that you lack self-control’). Again, there are lots of such examples on the web (e.g. here) but the best version for me was one used by Gillian Porter Ladousse (1983 – pp 63-65) as students are given specific little boxes to doodle in, so the whole thing is less open-ended. The extra benefit here of course is that students love to doodle/draw!

Astrology: Astrology of course is the most easily used springboard. For one thing, no additional input is necessary as most people have some idea of what the most representative traits of their zodiac sign are (e.g. ‘Leo: Magnanimous, generous and dominant’ [If your class know little about such things, they can find brief descriptions here]). Students can simply take turns talking to each other about how well these traits reflect their own personality (e.g. ‘I would not say I am bossy, but I can be assertive if I have to’). One can then follow this up with a more serious discussion about how valid these descriptions are – perhaps by making use of the first clip with the Astrologer and the Psychologist. [NB: To round off the lesson one can use the brilliantly funny clip ‘Madam Zodiac’ (link here; for a handout click here)].

A word of warning:  McRaney (2012 – p. 122) relates a fascinating anecdote about the Psychologist Ray Hayman. The latter had started out as a magician and then moved on to mentalism. His specialty was ‘cold reading’ where you start off with vague generalities about the person opposite you and then depending on how they respond you fine-tune your statements so that by the end it looks like you could read them like a book, when in fact it is they who (inadvertently) provide you with all the information. So successful was Hayman and so enthusiastic was the response he got that he actually came to believe he genuinely had a gift! It was at this point that another mentalist came to his rescue. ‘Try telling them the exact opposite of what you intended to tell them’ he advised Hayman. So Hayman did and amazingly, his ‘victims’ were just as stunned by his perspicacity as they had been before! Hayman switched to science… 🙂

References

Fine, C. “A Mind of its Own”  Icon Books 2005

Forer, B.R. (1949). “The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility”. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (American Psychological Association) 44 (1): 118–123

Gilbert, D. “Stumbling on Happiness” Harper Perennial 2007

Ladousse, G. P. “Speaking Personally” Cambridge University Press 1983

McRaney, D. “You are not so Smart” Oneworld 2012

Personality – A walk in the woods: http://www.allthetests.com/quiz26/quiz/1264264524/True-Seasons-Personality-Test

Personality – Astrology: http://www.the12houses.com/2008/09/20/the-12-zodiac-signs-short-version/

Personality – Doodling: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2036328/What-doodles-really-say-Arrows-ambition-flowers-family.html

Personality – Graphology: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2380858/What-does-handwriting-say-Study-finds-5-000-personality-traits-linked-write.html

Ramachandran, V. S. “The Tell-Tale Brain” Windmill 2012

Getting People to make the ‘Right’ Choice

Sheer Magic: ‘Pick a card – any card! It’s the Queen of Hearts, right?’  When given a choice, we are of course free to select whichever option we want, yet it often happens that somehow the conjurer knows in advance which one this is going to be! How do they do it? Through trial and error, salesmen, advertisers and politicians over the centuries have discovered ways of making sure we pick the right card – the one they want us to. During the past few decades Psychology has painstakingly uncovered some of the mechanisms that people who are in the business of persuading others have long known and exploited. So how do you give people a choice yet at the same time ‘nudge’ them in the ‘right’ direction? Here are some ways (not that we would ever use them…)

Consistency: Study after study has shown that people feel the need to be consistent, and that they use what they have done (or said) in the past as a heuristic about what to do in a given situation. To see how this can be manipulated, just watch this fantastic demonstration by the great Sir Humphrey Appleby:

This is called the ‘Four Walls Technique’ (Levine 2006 – p. 164). You ask the other person a series of rhetorical questions (usually four) before presenting them with a choice. Typically, by that stage they have no option but to say ‘Yes’ or lose face by appearing inconsistent. So, say a student is not certain about whether they would like to attend this optional summer course your school is offering: ‘Do you think English is important today?’  ‘Would you agree that we need to make the most of our time?’ etc… (Not that you would ever do such a thing…).

Perceptual Contrast: Faced with options A and B, you are more likely to choose B if you are given some information about it, after receiving less information about A. For instance, if you spent 1 min talking about coursebook A and then 5 min about coursebook B, chances are your client will go for B. It seems that because people feel they are more knowledgeable about B, that somehow gives them greater confident in their choice. Now here is the bizarre thing: this works even if A is completely unrelated to B! (Tormala & Petty 2007). So, instead of talking about coursebook A, you could spend that first minute talking about a coffee-maker before plunging into your spiel about the coursebook!! OK – now you know what to do if you want a student to go for course B (Not that you would ever do such a thing…).

Cognitive Dissonance: To get students to choose option B, first get them to reject option A somehow! In a fantastic study, researchers offered students 2 M&Ms (say, red and green – though they alternated the colours to avoid any bias). Say a particular student chose the red one. Immediately afterwards they presented the same student with the green one and a blue one. Which one did s/he choose? That’s right – students overwhelmingly chose the one they hadn’t rejected initially; that is the blue one! Because they had rejected the green one initially, somehow the students had constructed a justification in their mind (e.g. ‘It won’t taste good’) and incredibly, this influenced their choice the second time round! (Paul Bloom – YT: Lecture 16, 29:00) So if you would like a student to take Exam B rather than Exam A, just get them to compare Exam A with a clearly better exam C initially (Not that you would ever do such a thing…).

Getting the girls to pick you: Professor Dan Ariely  has uncovered another amazing technique (Ariely 2008 – pp. 11-15). Given options A and B, people are far more likely to choose B if we also introduce a third one, which is very similar to B but clearly inferior (option ‘minus B’). The idea is that because B is clearly better than –B, this superiority ‘spills over’ to A as well! He tested this with actual and computer-morphed faces (see below). In Condition A, most people thought A was better-looking, but in condition B, they thought B was hotter. So now you know… If you are going to a party and your arch-rival is going to be there, you just need to bring along someone who looks like you, but is clearly uglier. Not that you would ever do such a thing… 🙂

References:

Ariely, D. “Predictably Irrational” HarperCollins 2008.

Bloom, P. “Introduction to Psychology” Yale Courses, You Tube 2008.

Levine, R. “The Power of Persuasion” Oneworld 2006.

Tormala, Z. I. and Petty, R. E. (2007) “Contextual Contrast and Perceived Knowledge: Exploring the Implications for Persuasion” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43: 17-30.

From Action to Attitude

Tags

Consistency, Influence, Self-herding

Why do we do what we do? Well, a number of answers spring to mind ‘Because it is the right thing to do’ or ‘Because we like it’ or ‘Because we have to’. All these explanations are reasonable of course, but what if there is another one? What if the reason we do something is that we just happened to do it at some point in the past?!?

Imagine this scenario: you are walking down the street, you are a bit tired, you are in a bit of a hurry – you are also badly in need of caffeine. Normally you have coffee at ‘Dunkin’ Donuts’, but this is a few blocks away and you happen to walk past this place you have never been to before – ‘Starbucks’… I will let the great Ariely continue the story…

This simple observation is one of the most profound discoveries in the field of Social Psychology: Our brain is lazy; we don’t want to seriously sit down and think about each and everything we do every day. Instead, we rely on heuristics. One of the most potent heuristics is this: ‘What did I do last time?’ Never mind that last time I was in a hurry and ‘Dunkin’ Donuts’ happened to be away; we don’t remember these things – instead we remember what we did. And then what do we do? We ‘line up behind ourselves’ and do the same thing!

Not only that; according to Psychologist Daryl Bem, we also change our beliefs and attitudes so that they are consistent with our new behaviour pattern! ‘For many things, our attitudes come from actions, that led to observations, that led to explanations, that led to beliefs’ (McRaney 2013 – p. 60). Common sense says the chain of causation is: ‘I like films = I go to the cinema’;  Bem says: ‘I go to the cinema = I must like films!’

This of course has huge implications for us: if we can get our students to act in certain ways (e.g. be responsible, punctual, participate actively, behave in a pro-social way) initially, chances are they are going to carry on acting in the same manner and they are going to adjust their self-perception accordingly!

Consider the following study which is a classic in its simplicity: Psychologist Jack Brehm asked a number of children to rate how much they liked a long list of vegetables. He then told them that he wanted to see whether they might think differently after they had eaten them. So he asked them to eat, say, broccoli three times a week for the next few weeks. Each child was served with the particular vegetable which they had listed as the one they hated the most. A month later, Brehm again asked the same children to rate the items on the original list. Sure enough, the ‘despised’ veggies had moved up in the students’ preferences! Cognitive dissonance theory allows us to reconstruct what might have gone on inside the children’s head ‘Here I am, regularly eating this stuff – without being forced. Either I am a fool, or it’s not actually so bad’. Which of the two options would be the more appealing to them?

In fact, there are countless studies which show we all tend to act consistently across time – regardless of how carefully we considered our original action was (e.g. Ariely 2010 – Ch. 10). So here is the Moral: ‘If social psychology has taught us anything is that not only do we think ourselves into a way of acting, but also we act ourselves into a way of thinking’ (D. Myers) Brilliant!

References

Ariely, D. “The Upside of Irrationality” HarperCollins 2010.

Brehm, J. W. (1960) “Attitudinal Consequences of Commitment to Unpleasant Behaviour”  Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60, 370-383.

McRaney, D. “You can Beat your Brain” Oneworld 2013.

Why Online Communication May Lead to Problems

Tags

Communication, Conflict, Flaming, Misunderstanding

‘Banu Akrod (aged 23) delivered the best Plenary of the Convention’. That’s a straightforward remark, isn’t it? But wait – do I really mean it, or am I being sarcastic? Of course when I write something I know what my intention is, but what about the recipients of the message?

In a fascinating study, Professor Nicholas Epley et al asked some volunteers to write two sentences about some ordinary topics, such as food, cars, dating etc. One of them had to be sincere and the other one sarcastic. The subjects were then asked to convey these messages to another one of the participants. In some cases they were to do this over the phone and in another by e-mail. Would the recipients ‘get’ the right message? Does it make a difference which medium is used?

Crucially, the senders were asked to predict whether they thought their message would be properly understood. The recipients were also asked to predict in how many of the cases they would correctly gauge the sender’s intention.

The results can be seen in the graph below. Regardless of the medium, the senders were optimistic: they thought recipients would understand their intended meaning in about 80% of the cases. Recipients were even more optimistic – they thought they would ‘get it’ in 9 cases out of 10. Of course, they were both wrong…

The first thing which can immediately be seen from the graph is an ‘optimism bias’ – expectations exceeded the actual results in all cases. But whereas the senders were quite close in figuring out how many would understand what they really meant when this was conveyed over the phone (73.1%) they were very wrong when it came to online communication. The recipients got it right a little more than 56% of the time – that’s little better than chance! The difference between 56% and 78% is huge (and that between 56% and 89% is huger still! 🙂 )

The Moral: Prosodic features convey a wealth of information which is lost when you put something in writing. The likelihood of misunderstandings in online communication is very, very high. [Epley, N. “Mindwise” – Allen Lane 2014, p. 108].

[Look at any thread on FB where there is a divergence of opinion. Very often what starts as a polite disagreement quickly escalates into a proper punch-up (the well-known phenomenon of ‘flaming’). Epley’s findings can go a long way towards explaining why this happens, as does the fact that our brain has a built-in ‘negativity bias’. Not only do we focus excessively on negative incidents and slights, we tend to ‘overperceive’ them and remember them more.]

The Effects of Expectations

Tags

Classroom Management, Expectations, Halo Effect, Motivation, Self-fulfilling Prophecy

“So it is (if you think so…)”

Fancy a pint? How would you like a glass of beer? It’s tasty, well-chilled, refreshing and, perhaps more importantly – free! (To quote Plato – ‘If you have to pay for your pleasure, then what kind of pleasure is that?’) In addition, you are also going to be given a choice! You can choose between beer A or beer B. Beer B, the ‘MIT brew’, is special and it contains a secret ingredient! You can taste them both and make your choice. Now think: would it make any difference if you knew in advance that this secret ingredient was in fact a drop of balsamic vinegar? Over to Professor Ariely now – just watch the video…

So what is the moral? Here it is: ‘Expectations Colour Experience’. How we perceive something depends on what we expect it to be like. And this doesn’t just have to do with food and drink…

How do we perceive people? Imagine you are a university student. You are waiting for the first session of ‘Introductory Economics 70’ to begin. Then somebody comes in and says that something has happened to the professor who normally teaches the course, so a stand-in instructor will deliver the lecture. The only thing is that, because the department would like some feedback, the students will be asked to fill in an evaluation form afterwards. By way of introduction, each student is given a slip of paper with some information about this lecturer. Naturally (as this was in fact a Psychology experiment – although students did not know it) there were two versions of this short bio. Here they are. Can you spot the difference?

A: “Mr Long is a graduate student in the Department of Economics and Social Science here at MIT. He has had three semesters of teaching experience in psychology at another college. This is his first semester teaching Ec 70. He is 26 years old, a veteran, and married. People who know him consider him to be a very warm person, industrious, critical, practical and determined”.

B: “Mr Long is a graduate student in the Department of Economics and Social Science here at MIT. He has had three semesters of teaching experience in psychology at another college. This is his first semester teaching Ec 70. He is 26 years old, a veteran, and married. People who know him consider him to be a rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical and determined”.

That’s right. The only difference is two words: ‘very warm’ as opposed to ‘rather cold’. Would that tiny detail make a difference? Of course it did. Students who had received bio A were much more positive in their evaluations later; they described the lecturer as ‘considerate’, ‘popular’ and ‘humorous’; it was as if the other students had seen a different person! They described him as ‘unsociable’, ‘irritable’ and ‘self-centred’. So much for independent thinking… 🙂  But that wasn’t all; this prejudice also affected the students’ level of participation. Among the former students two-thirds participated actively; among the latter, only one third made any contribution during the session! Apparently, two little words lost in a longish paragraph can nevertheless have a huge impact… Here is Professor Bloom explaining why this happens along with the very interesting concept of ‘Confirmation Bias’:

Expectations and ELT: So what does all this mean for teaching and ELT? It is clear then that as Professor Ariely says, very often what we expect to get is what we actually get. That means that we have a great tool at our disposal – we can influence students’ experiences before they happen! Here are four simple tips:

‘Sell’ your activities to your students: ‘And now, we are going to play an amazing game – this is one of my absolute favourites!’

Do NOT predispose your students negatively: ‘OK, I know most of you are not going to like this, but we have to do it because…’

Get your DOS or somebody else to ‘sell’ you to your new class: ‘OK guys, I am very proud to introduce you to Nick. Nick has …’ Do not do it yourself; research shows that it is far more persuasive if done by somebody else (have you noticed what happens before any speaker takes the podium in any great event? – see also: Goldstein, Martin & Cialdini 2007 – p. 81).

‘Sell’ your students to the next teacher: You may have the best intentions when you say ‘OK, Mary is a bit of a problem; she is weak and disruptive’ but in fact, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy (Rosenthal & Jacobson 1968). Instead, you can stress her positive points.

How about another drink? Expectations are extremely potent. In an unbelievable field experiment, students in a bar were given blue and red badges to wear on their wrists. Then they were given memory, reflexes and balance tests. Of course they did well as they were all sober. Towards the end of the evening, things were different however – people could remember less, their reflexes were slower and their sense of balance impaired. It was the same for both groups. The only thing is – unbeknownst to them, the blue group had been drinking non-alcoholic drinks throughout the evening! Yet they were just as ‘drunk’ as the others… 🙂 (Wiseman 2010 – p. 199).

 

 

References

Goldstein, N., Martin, S. & Cialdini, R. “Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion”  Profile Books 2007

Lee, L., Frederick, S. & Ariely, D. (2006) “Try it, You’ll Like It: The Influence of Expectations, Consumption and Revelation on Preferences for Beer” Psychological Science 17(12):1054-8.

Kelley, H. H. (1950) “The Warm-Cold Variable in First Impressions of Persons” Journal of Personality, 18, 431-439.

Rosenthal, R.; Jacobson, L. 1968. Pygmalion in the classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Wiseman, R. “59 Seconds” Pan Books 2010